Cognitive Deficit Related To Insomnia Treatable With Six Weeks Of Therapy - Study

Monday, September 1, 2008 - 01:56 in Psychology & Sociology

A neuroimaging study in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Sleep is the first to find that cognitive processes related to verbal fluency are compromised in people with insomnia despite the absence of a behavioral deficit. These specific brain function alterations can be reversed, however, through non-pharmacological treatment with sleep therapy. Results of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanning during verbal fluency tasks show that people with insomnia have less activation than controls in the left medial prefrontal cortex and the left interior frontal gyrus, two fluency-specific brain regions. However, participants with insomnia generated more words than controls on both the category fluency task (46.4 words compared with 38.7 words) and the letter fluency task (40.1 words compared with 32.7 words). Read More...

Read the whole article on Scientific Blogging

More from Scientific Blogging

Related

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox!