Concussions May Correlate With Development of Sleep Disorders Over Time

According to a study published in Neurology, individuals who have experienced traumatic brain injuries (TBI), such as concussions, may have higher risk for developing a sleeping disorder over time.

The study observed individuals from the Veterans Health Administration system with a TBI. There were 98,709 veterans with a TBI matched by age with the same number of veterans with no history of TBI. None of the people had sleep disorders at the start of the study. During the 14-year period of observation, 23,127 participants (23%) with TBI developed sleep disorders, compared with 15,583 participants (16%) without TBI. Researchers found that individuals with TBI were 40% more likely to develop a sleep disorder than people without TBI. 
 
“We found that people with TBI had an increased risk of insomnia, sleep apnea, sleep-related movement disorders and excessive daytime sleepiness—every sleep disorder we looked at,” said study author Yue Leng, MD, PhD, of the University of California, San Francisco. “Since sleep disorders affect people’s quality of life and their rehabilitation process, it will be important to develop strategies to identify these disorders early as well as prevent them from occurring after TBIs to improve people’s overall health and quality of life.”
  
Of the veterans with TBI, 11% developed sleep apnea, compared with 8% of those without TBI. For insomnia, 12% of those with TBI started experiencing it, compared with 7% of those without TBI. The researchers found that the association between TBI and sleep disorders was stronger for people who had mild traumatic brain injuries (concussions) than for those who had moderate or severe TBIs. 
 
“More research is needed to determine the underlying mechanisms for a link between different severity of TBI and development of sleep disorders,” Leng said. “The stronger association for people with mild TBI could be due to the different brain injury mechanism for those injuries, which often involve repetitive concussive injuries or acceleration or deceleration injuries causing more diffuse injury and inflammation, compared with moderate or severe TBIs, which are often due to a direct blow to the head with more focused but severe damage.”