Brain health: Schizophrenia patients' symptoms grow by disrupted sleep, wakefulness trends? Here's what study says

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and those from Italy described common patterns of sleep disturbances and irregularities in daily rhythms of rest and activity across patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder, or SSD, in a paper that was just published in Molecular Psychiatry. Here's what study says Researchers discovered that people with SSD who live in psychiatric facilities and those who manage their condition in outpatient settings both have irregular sleep patterns, dysregulated transitions between sleep and wake cycles, and excessively rigid daily routines that are predictive of worse SSD symptoms and are associated with lower quality of life. "Regulating sleep and wake cycles is important for your overall health and our findings can also be extended to people without underlying mental health conditions," said associate professor of psychiatry and senior author of the study Fabio Ferrarelli, M.D., Ph.D. "Most people can benefit from better sleep hygiene and paying attention to their daily routines by incorporating activity and variety in their daily lives." Effects of disrupted sleep have long been studied in the context of physical and mental health, and well-established research literature suggests that people suffering from SSD have trouble falling asleep and get poorer rest than people without underlying mental health conditions. In our study, this rigidity in daily rhythms was strongly correlated to the severity of negative mental health symptoms in residential patients with schizophrenia."