Painajaiset - psyykkinen yleisoire

Painajaiset ovat vahvoja negatiivisia tunteita sisältäviä unia. Kaikki näkevät ajoittain yksittäisiä painajaisia ilman negatiivisia seurauksia, mutta jatkuvat painajaiset voivat olla vakava ongelma. Jatkuvat painajaiset liittyvät usein masennukseen ja unettomuuteen tai voivat olla oire traumaperäisestä stressireaktiosta. Painajaisten määrää lisäävät myös psyykkinen kuormitus ja unen rakenteeseen vaikuttavat lääkkeet tai päihteet. Painajaiset ovat ilmiönä täysin subjektiivisia: ainoastaan uneksija tietää, miltä hänen painajaisensa tuntuvat. Tämän vuoksi painajaisten tieteellinen tutkimus on vaativaa, ja on myös vaikeaa määritellä objektiivisia kriteereitä sille, milloin painajaiset ovat ongelma. Psyykkisen kuormituksen helpottaminen vähentää usein painajaisten määrää, mutta niiden hoitoon on myös kehitetty kognitiivista psykoterapiaa, jonka tehosta on lupaavaa näyttöä.</p

Dreaming and parasomnias - a case with severe parasomnia overlap disorder and its treatment

Peer reviewe

Nightmares as predictors of suicide : an extension study including war veterans

Nightmares are intensive dreams with negative emotional tone. Frequent nightmares can pose a serious clinical problem and in 2001, Tanskanen et al. found that nightmares increase the risk of suicide. However, the dataset used by these authors included war veterans in whom nightmare frequency -and possibly also suicide risk -is elevated. Therefore, re-examination of the association between nightmares and suicide in these data is warranted. We investigated the relationship between nightmares and suicide both in the general population and war veterans in Finnish National FINRISK Study from the years 1972 to 2012, a dataset overlapping with the one used in the study by Tanskanen et al. Our data comprise 71,068 participants of whom 3139 are war veterans. Participants were followed from their survey participation until the end of 2014 or death. Suicides (N = 398) were identified from the National Causes of Death Register. Frequent nightmares increase the risk of suicide: The result of Tanskanen et al. holds even when war experiences are controlled for. Actually nightmares are not significantly associated with suicides among war veterans. These results support the role of nightmares as an independent risk factor for suicide instead of just being proxy for history of traumatic experiences.Peer reviewe

Dream emotions: a comparison of home dream reports with laboratory early and late REM dream reports

The aim of this study was to compare the emotional content of dream reports collected at home upon morning awakenings with those collected in the laboratory upon early and late rapid eye movement (REM) sleep awakenings. Eighteen adults (11 women, seven men; mean age = 25.89 ± 4.85) wrote down their home dreams every morning immediately upon awakening during a 7-day period. Participants also spent two non-consecutive nights in the sleep laboratory where they were awoken 5 min into each continuous REM sleep stage, upon which they gave a verbal dream report. The content of a total of 151 home and 120 laboratory dream reports was analysed by two blind judges using the modified Differential Emotions Scale. It was found that: (1) home dream reports were more emotional than laboratory early REM dream reports, but not more emotional than laboratory late REM dream reports; (2) home dream reports contained a higher density of emotions than laboratory (early or late REM) dream reports; and (3) home dream reports were more negative than laboratory dream reports, but differences between home and early REM reports were larger than those between home and late REM reports. The results suggest that differences between home and laboratory dream reports in overall emotionality may be due to the time of night effect. Whether differences in the density of emotions and negative emotionality are due to sleep environment or due to different reporting procedures and time spent in a sleep stage, respectively, remains to be determined in future studies.</p

Nightmares as predictors of suicide: an extension study including war veterans

Nightmares are intensive dreams with negative emotional tone. Frequent nightmares can pose a serious clinical problem and in 2001, Tanskanen et al. found that nightmares increase the risk of suicide. However, the dataset used by these authors included war veterans in whom nightmare frequency - and possibly also suicide risk - is elevated. Therefore, re-examination of the association between nightmares and suicide in these data is warranted. We investigated the relationship between nightmares and suicide both in the general population and war veterans in Finnish National FINRISK Study from the years 1972 to 2012, a dataset overlapping with the one used in the study by Tanskanen et al. Our data comprise 71,068 participants of whom 3139 are war veterans. Participants were followed from their survey participation until the end of 2014 or death. Suicides (N = 398) were identified from the National Causes of Death Register. Frequent nightmares increase the risk of suicide: The result of Tanskanen et al. holds even when war experiences are controlled for. Actually nightmares are not significantly associated with suicides among war veterans. These results support the role of nightmares as an independent risk factor for suicide instead of just being proxy for history of traumatic experiences.</p

Pandemic Dreams : Network Analysis of Dream Content During the COVID-19 Lockdown

We used crowdsourcing (CS) to examine how COVID-19 lockdown affects the content of dreams and nightmares. The CS took place on the sixth week of the lockdown. Over the course of 1 week, 4,275 respondents (mean age 43, SD = 14 years) assessed their sleep, and 811 reported their dream content. Overall, respondents slept substantially more (54.2%) but reported an average increase of awakenings (28.6%) and nightmares (26%) from the pre-pandemic situation. We transcribed the content of the dreams into word lists and performed unsupervised computational network and cluster analysis of word associations, which suggested 33 dream clusters including 20 bad dream clusters, of which 55% were pandemic-specific (e.g., Disease Management, Disregard of Distancing, Elderly in Trouble). The dream-association networks were more accentuated for those who reported an increase in perceived stress. This CS survey on dream-association networks and pandemic stress introduces novel, collectively shared COVID-19 bad dream contentsPeer reviewe

Winter is coming: nightmares and sleep problems during seasonal affective disorder

Sleep problems, especially nightmares and insomnia, often accompany depression. This study investigated how nightmares, symptoms of insomnia, chronotype and sleep duration associate with seasonal affective disorder, a special form of depression. Additionally, it was noted how latitude, a proxy for photoperiod, and characteristics of the place of residence affect the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder and sleep problems. To study these questions, data from FINRISK 2012 study were used. FINRISK 2012 consists of a random population sample of Finnish adults aged 25–74 years (n = 4905) collected during winter from Finnish urban and rural areas spanning the latitudes of 60°N to 66°N. The Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire was used to assess symptoms of seasonal affective disorder. Participants with symptoms of seasonal affective disorder had significantly increased odds of experiencing frequent nightmares and symptoms of insomnia, and they were more often evening chronotypes. Associations between latitude, population size and urbanicity with seasonal affective disorder symptoms and sleep disturbances were generally not significant, although participants living in areas bordering urban centres had less sleep problems than participants from other regions. These data show that the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder was not affected by latitude.</p

Winter is coming : nightmares and sleep problems during seasonal affective disorder

Sleep problems, especially nightmares and insomnia, often accompany depression. This study investigated how nightmares, symptoms of insomnia, chronotype and sleep duration associate with seasonal affective disorder, a special form of depression. Additionally, it was noted how latitude, a proxy for photoperiod, and characteristics of the place of residence affect the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder and sleep problems. To study these questions, data from FINRISK 2012 study were used. FINRISK 2012 consists of a random population sample of Finnish adults aged 25-74 years (n = 4905) collected during winter from Finnish urban and rural areas spanning the latitudes of 60 degrees N to 66 degrees N. The Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire was used to assess symptoms of seasonal affective disorder. Participants with symptoms of seasonal affective disorder had significantly increased odds of experiencing frequent nightmares and symptoms of insomnia, and they were more often evening chronotypes. Associations between latitude, population size and urbanicity with seasonal affective disorder symptoms and sleep disturbances were generally not significant, although participants living in areas bordering urban centres had less sleep problems than participants from other regions. These data show that the prevalence of seasonal affective disorder was not affected by latitude.Peer reviewe

On no man’s land: Subjective experiences during unresponsive and responsive sedative states induced by four different anesthetic agents

To understand how anesthetics with different molecular mechanisms affect consciousness, we explored subjective experiences recalled after responsive and unresponsive sedation induced with equisedative doses of dexmedetomidine, propofol, sevoflurane, and S-ketamine in healthy male participants (N = 140). The anesthetics were administered in experimental setting using target-controlled infusion or vapouriser for one hour. Interviews conducted after anesthetic administration revealed that 46.9% (n = 46) of arousable participants (n = 98) reported experiences, most frequently dreaming or memory incorporation of the setting. Participants receiving dexmedetomidine reported experiences most often while S-ketamine induced the most multimodal experiences. Responsiveness at the end of anesthetic administration did not affect the prevalence or content of reported experiences. These results demonstrate that subjective experiences during responsive and unresponsive sedation are common and anesthetic agents with different molecular mechanisms of action may have different effects on the prevalence and complexity of the experiences, albeit in the present sample the differences between drugs were minute.</p