Sleep Disturbances for Parkies, with a Focus on Asia: Q and A
Q: Which is the bigger issue for most Parkies: problems sleeping at night, or excessive daytime sleepiness?
A: Problems sleeping at night.
Q: How big a problem is this (i.e., nighttime sleeping disorders)?
A: According to lots of research, about 60% of Parkies worldwide have sleeping disorders.
Q: What about excessive daytime sleepiness?
A: This exists at much lower rates and depends on where you are. About 40% of Parkies in America suffer with daytime sleepiness, as do 32% of European Parkies, and 22% of Parkies in Asia. This stark difference in Asia raises the question of whether there’s a genetic component linked to daytime sleepiness, or culture/lifestyle issues.
Q: Where are you getting this information?
A: From an academic article, “The impact of nocturnal disturbances on daily quality of life in patients with Parkinson’s disease,” which appeared a few years ago (2015) in Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment. It focuses on a research study that involved 211 patients with PD who lived in Taiwan, but it refers to similar studies completed in Western countries as well as other Asian countries.
Q: What is the article mostly about?
A: It documents and describes sleep disturbances on 211 Parkies in Taiwan, and how these disturbances affect their quality of life.
Q: What’s the conclusion? What’s the main takeaway?
A: It’s pretty basic. To quote directly: “Most of the PD patients have sleep problems, and nearly one-quarter of them have abnormal daytime somnolence. The nocturnal disturbances were found to result in worse QoL [Quality of Life] in PD patients.” However, the article points out that researchers need to investigate further why daytime sleepiness is significantly lower in Asia than in other parts of the world.
Q: What’s the entire list of nighttime sleep disturbances?
A: Here are the ones I culled from the article or found elsewhere (Parking Suns readers may be able to add to this list):
- Difficulty falling asleep
- Waking up early
- Waking up in the middle of the night
- Insomnia
- Nocturnal cramps
- Nightmares
- Hallucinations
- Difficulty moving around in bed
- Thrashing around in your sleep
- Nocturnal muscle cramps
- Waking up repeatedly to use the toilet
- Nocturnal restlessness, including Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS)
- Tremor upon awakening
- Pain in the arms or the legs
- Pain when getting out of bed
Q: How did these researchers in Taiwan judge “Quality of Life”?
A: They looked at mobility, activities of daily living, emotional well-being, social support, cognition, communication, and bodily discomfort.
Q: What did the researchers find with their 211 Parkie volunteers?
A: Compared to Parkies in other studies done in the West or in Japan, these Taiwanese patients “had the shortest sleep duration, spending 7.2 hours in bed every night; however, they only experience 5.9 hours of actual sleep, on average.”
Q: What else?
A: To quote directly: “We found a weak relationship between daytime somnolence and sleep quality at night, and EDS [Excessive Daytime Sleepiness] did not contribute to sleep quality at night in the predictive model. It seems that daytime and night-time sleep problems have distinct underlying mechanisms and require different forms of management….Interestingly, our results indicate that sleep disturbances at night hold critical importance for QoL [Quality of Life], whereas daytime sleepiness does not seem to influence this outcome.”
Q: What do the authors recommend?
A: Two things: (1) More researchers should look at the differences in PD as experienced by people in Asia vs. people in Western countries. (2) Parkies would benefit from sleep hygiene training.
Q: Sleep hygiene? What’s that?
A: The article doesn’t dive into this subject, but perhaps a future Parking Suns post will. You can start to learn about sleep hygiene by reading this article Web MD: Click!
