Sleep and Pain in Veterans with Chronic Pain: Effects of Psychological Pain Treatment and Temporal Associations.

Introduction: Chronic pain is highly prevalent in US military Veterans. Non-opioid and non-pharmacologic treatments are recommended when clinically appropriate, but research on the mechanisms underlying benefits of these treatments is lacking. Here, we examined the role of sleep in the effects of three non-pharmacologic pain treatments in Veterans.

Nighttime Sleep and Respiratory Disturbances in Individuals Receiving Methadone to Treat Opioid Use Disorder.

Opioids are a leading cause of drug overdose deaths in the United States. Methadone used as medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD) reduces drug cravings and promotes abstinence. However, individuals in methadone-based MOUD treatment commonly report subjective sleep complaints and are at risk for respiratory depression from opioids.

Race/ethnicity, sleep duration, and mortality risk in the United States.

Current evidence and professional guidance recommend sleeping between 7 and 9 h in a 24-h period for optimal health. The present study examines the association between sleep duration and mortality and assesses whether this association varies by racial/ethnic identity for a large and diverse sample of United States adults. We use data on 274,836 adults, aged 25 and older, from the 2004-2014 waves of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) linked to prospective mortality through 2015 (23,382 deaths).

Effects of total sleep deprivation on components of top-down attentional control using a flexible attentional control task.

Sleep deprivation consistently decreases vigilant attention, which can lead to difficulty in performing a variety of cognitive tasks. However, sleep-deprived individuals may be able to compensate for degraded vigilant attention by means of top-down attentional control. We employed a novel task to measure the degree to which individuals overcome impairments in vigilant attention by using top-down attentional control, the Flexible Attentional Control Task (FACT).

Enhancing learning and retention through the distribution of practice repetitions across multiple sessions.

The acquisition and retention of knowledge is affected by a multitude of factors including amount of practice, elapsed time since practice occurred, and the temporal distribution of practice. The third factor, temporal distribution of practice, is at the heart of research on the spacing effect. This research has consistently shown that separating practice repetitions by a delay slows acquisition but enhances retention.

Sleep deprivation impairs binding of information with its context.

Binding information to its context in long-term memory is critical for many tasks, including memory tasks and decision making. Failure to associate information to its context could be an important aspect of sleep deprivation effects on cognition, but little is known about binding problems from being sleep-deprived at the time of encoding. We studied how sleep deprivation affects binding using a well-established paradigm testing the ability to remember auditorily presented words (items) and their speakers (source context).

Sleep Deprivation and Sleep-Onset Insomnia are Associated with Blunted Physiological Reactivity to Stressors.

Introduction: Military operations often involve intense exposure to stressors combined with acute sleep deprivation, while military personnel also experience high prevalence of chronic sleep deficiency from insomnia and other sleep disorders. However, the impact of acute and chronic sleep deficiency on physiologic stressor responses is poorly understood. In a controlled laboratory study with normal sleepers and individuals with chronic sleep-onset insomnia, we measured responses to an acute stressor administered in a sleep deprivation condition or a control condition.

Robustness of inter-individual differences in slow wave sleep for daytime sleep periods after total sleep deprivation with or without caffeine administration: potential implications for around-the-clock operations.

There are large inter-individual differences in slow wave sleep, which constitute a trait or phenotype. We investigated whether the manifestation of this trait is impacted by daytime sleeping after sleep deprivation, and to what extent it is robust to prior caffeine intake. N = 12 subjects underwent three 48 h periods of total sleep deprivation with different caffeine dosing regimens.

Circulating Exosomal miRNAs Signal Circadian Misalignment to Peripheral Metabolic Tissues.

Night shift work increases risk of metabolic disorders, particularly obesity and insulin resistance. While the underlying mechanisms are unknown, evidence points to misalignment of peripheral oscillators causing metabolic disturbances. A pathway conveying such misalignment may involve exosome-based intercellular communication.

Psychomotor Vigilance Impairment During Total Sleep Deprivation Is Exacerbated in Sleep-Onset Insomnia.

Purpose: Individuals with primary insomnia frequently report cognitive impairment as a next-day consequence of disrupted sleep. Studies attempting to quantify daytime impairment objectively in individuals with insomnia have yielded mixed results, with evidence suggesting impairments in aspects of executive functioning but not psychomotor vigilance. It has been suggested that persons with insomnia may have latent performance deficits for which they would be able to compensate effectively under normal daytime circumstances - suggesting that any such deficits may be exposed through perturbation.

Cardiac autonomic activity during sleep deprivation with and without caffeine administration.

Caffeine is often consumed to mitigate degraded alertness associated with sleep deprivation. Both caffeine and sleep deprivation have been implicated in cardiovascular disease, but evidence is largely anecdotal. We determined the effects of sleep deprivation and caffeine on markers of cardiac autonomic activity.

Action plan interrupted: resolution of proactive interference while coordinating execution of multiple action plans during sleep deprivation.

The ability to retain an action plan to execute another is necessary for most complex, goal-directed behavior. Research shows that executing an action plan to an interrupting event can be delayed when it partly overlaps (vs. does not overlap) with the retained action plan.