Study outlines risks of insomnia

MINNEAPOLIS, June 11 (UPI) -- If a patient has had one bout of insomnia, the chances are high it will happen again, U.S. researchers said this week.

Scientists interviewed 437 people who considered themselves "good sleepers," gave them a battery of psychological tests and found that there was more than a five-fold risk of another insomnia episode if there had been one in the person's past.

"Improved knowledge of these risk factors could guide the development of more effective public health prevention and intervention programs for insomnia," Melanie LeBlanc, a research associate in psychology at Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, told United Press International.

At the 21st annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Minneapolis, LeBlanc said the next most important risk factor was the finding that a history of insomnia existed in the family, she said.

That increased a person's odds of suffering a bout of insomnia by nearly three times, compared to people who didn't have insomniacs in the family tree.

Lesser risk factors, but still significant, were a person's predisposition to be aroused from sleep -- or whether they were light sleepers who awoke to noises that would not trouble others -- general health problems or bodily pain.

Leblanc also found that when a person in the study suffered through a bout of insomnia, it significantly increased his or her depressive symptoms and anxiety, while decreasing the person's overall subjective mental health examination.