Browsing by Author "Laitinen, Paavo"

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorder with high heritability. Patients with SZ commonly suffer from sleep problems of different types, some of them with potential underlying abnormalities in sleep oscillations. These changes in sleep are usually accompanied by deficits in cognitive performance. However, the relationship between sleep, cognitive performance and genetic risk factors are not well known in SZ. In this study, patients were selected from a nation-wide SUPER -cohort. Sleep and circadian rhythm of patients with SZ (n = 26) and age-matched healthy controls (n = 11) were followed for a week with actigraphy and sleep diary, combined with word-pair -memory task and polysomnography at the end of the week. The results showed that patients spend more time in lighter sleep and awake during the night than controls. As expected, patients had impaired sleep spindle density compared to controls. Additionally, patient had worse overnight memory consolidation. However, sleep spindle density was not associated with memory performance. Lastly, polygenic risk score (PRS) for long sleep, but not PRS for SZ, predicted lower spindle density in patients, which could be indirect evidence for deviated neurophysiological processes of sleep behind the observed deviations in EEG oscillations among the patients. These results show that, as compared to controls, patients with SZ demonstrate abnormalities in their sleep, which can be seen both in macro- and microstructures of sleep. Further analyses of the interplay between sleep oscillations and genetic risk factors are likely needed to link sleep problems with overnight memory consolidation.