Sleep in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Abstract

Impaired sleep is a common complaint among patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. Sleep-related symptoms for post-traumatic stress disorder takes place within hyperarousal symptoms and re-experiencing traumatic life events in DSM-IV diagnostic criteria. Hyperarousal symptoms usually present as difficulty in initiation and maintaining sleep. Patients often complain from nightmares and these include repetition of traumatic events and reflect threatening incidents. Increased distressing dreams, increased phasic activity of rapid eye movement sleep, increased rapid eye movement sleep arousal, increased exaggerated startle response, a decrease in the recall of dreams and possibly increased arousal threshold are characteristics of sleep pattern in post-traumatic stress disorder

Keywords

• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• sleep
• polisomnography