Restless legs syndrome, sleep over the lifespan, sleep in the severely ill, shift-work and sleep loss.

Abstract

Dear members of the ESRS, Dear readers of JSR, Let me welcome you to the third issue of JSR in the year 2020. In these troubled times when I am writing this on March 28, 2020, I can only hope that at the time when this issue goes online we hopefully will already have seen the worst of the Coronavirus crisis. I hope you are all well! This issue covers a series of topics ranging from restless legs syndrome, to sleep over the lifespan to a variety of other topics, mainly clinically oriented. Four articles feature several aspects of the restless legs syndrome, including gender differences, health-related quality of life, perception threshold and lifespan changes. We have been able to attract seven manuscripts that are aimed at different aspects of sleep and its development over the lifespan. The first article in this series looks at the development of sleep–wake rhythms during the first year of age (Paavonen et al., 2020), whereas the last article in this series looks at sleep efficiency in the elderly and its relation to health (Didikoglu et al., 2020). The majority of the articles under this topic, however, are aimed at sleep in adolescents. Brett et al. (2020), probably for the first time ever, conducted a questionnaire study via the internet to investigate the impact of electronic cigarette use on sleep in young adults. There is a growing concern regarding electronic cigarette use in the last years, because of reported severe side effects, so it seems timely to collect data on the impact of this kind of nicotine consumption. As expected, it turned out that users of e-cigarettes reported higher use of hypnotic medication compared to standard cigarette smokers. E-cigarette use and normal cigarette smoking were associated with worse sleep health. Thus, it really seems timely to invest more effort in understanding the role of nicotine per se in different modes of application and its negative outcomes on sleep. Another article under this heading (Watling, 2020) looked at young drivers who continue to drive while sleepy. The obtained results did highlight the acceptance of risky driving behaviours among some younger drivers compared with the rest of the older study population, with younger drivers having a subjectively perceived ability to overcome sleepiness, committing more highway code violations and already having experienced a sleep-related close call. The authors conclude that younger drivers' risky driving behaviour is definitely a road safety concern given the impaired association with sleepiness and the over-representation of this group in road accidents. Another article from this issue I would like to highlight for you investigated whether sleep deprivation leads to an increase of threat beliefs in a human fear-conditioning paradigm (Zenses, Lenaert, Peigneux, Beckers, & Boddez, 2020). This study used a fear-conditioning procedure in a sample of 40 healthy volunteers with both males and females. It turned out that compared to a sleep condition, the sleep-deprivation paradigm changed subjective threat expectancies, but not psychophysiological parameters such as skin conductance response. The authors conclude from their data that sleep disturbances may play a role in anxiety disorders by increasing the perceived threat in everyday situations. This is an interesting approach, which definitely needs further investigation, as a strong link between disturbed sleep, especially insomnia, and depression and anxiety disorders is known.