An international research team led by the University of Bonn and King’s College London has found out that that after 24 hours of sleep deprivation healthy volunteers developed numerous symptoms otherwise typically attributed to psychosis or schizophrenia. For this purpose, Dr. Nadine Petrovsky and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Ettinger from the Institute of Psychology of the Bonn University, together with the research team from King’s College, examined 24 healthy volunteers of both sexes aged 18 to 40 years in the sleep laboratory.

After preventing the probands from sleeping, they conducted a prepulse inhibition to measure the brain’s filter function. Normally, filters separate important and unimportant information and prevent sensory overload, a mechanism that for example is disturbed in the schizophrenia patients. In subjects with sleep deficit this filter mechanism was reduced, leading to cerebral disorder.

“In drug development, mental disorders like these have been simulated to date in experiments using certain active substances. However, these convey the symptoms of psychoses in only a very limited manner,” says Prof. Ettinger. Sleep deprivation may be a much better model system because the subjective symptoms and the objectively measured filter disorder are far more akin to mental illnesses.

The advantage of this volunteer study compared with animal model is that the scientists are not groping in the dark, but rather can communicate with the subjects regarding the phenomena they experienced and their elimination following medical treatment, something that is not possible with animals. The mental phenomena induced by sleep deficit are not harmful: After a good night’s recovery sleep, the symptoms disappear.

More details and contact information (German):
http://www3.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/sleep-deprivation-leads-to-symptoms-of-schizophrenia