RMH research and tips for better sleep

This week is the Sleep Health Foundation’s Sleep Health Week. Sleep is essential for good health, along with healthy eating and regular exercise, but getting a good night’s sleep is easier said than done for some people.

Philip Dionysopoulos, medical scientist and education officer with the Royal Melbourne Hospital (RMH) Respiratory Medicine and Sleep Disorders Department, said it was important to continue research into sleep and sleep conditions to find out more about what may affect sleep quality, both positive and negatively. 

“In this era of modern tech, it is putting stresses on our sleep health that we haven’t had in other generations,” he said. 

“There is a push that exists to be online or contactable or engaged all the time, so any technology that has a benefit [to sleep] is welcomed as it helps level the field amongst available technologies."

Earlier this year, Dionysopoulos and fellow researchers from Denmark published research in the Journal of Sleep Research examining the efficacy of using weighted ball blankets to increase sleep time at night. The patients involved in the study – all from Denmark – were people with depression who reported symptoms of insomnia. The primary outcome the researchers looked at was the total amount of sleep time between 9pm and 8.59am each night. 

Lead author, PhD student Sanne Kristiansen from Aarhus University in Denmark, twice visited the RMH and Dionysopoulos during the course of this research. Dionysopoulos’s expertise was used, in particular, to help develop the methodology and in the analysis of the data.  

The patients slept for two weeks with the weighted blanket and then two weeks with the control duvet – or vice versa, as randomly assigned to each patient – and recorded the results in a diary. The blanket itself weighed 7kg, and was made of cotton with 5cm air-filled plastic balls inside.

The weighted ball blanket increased total sleep time by 12.9 min, while insomnia severity and depressive symptoms – which were both among several secondary outcomes the trial analysed  - decreased after 14 nights of sleep with the blanket. 

“The ball blankets demonstrated effectively that they can improve the total sleep time of people with insomnia in depression,” he said. “It is a very hard group to objectively help with sleep, and this data suggested in the end it was working and helping improve by about 12 minutes.” 

While 12 minutes may not sound like a large increase, Dr Dionysopoulos said it was an important improvement for this cohort of patients. 

The researchers noted that insomnia is often the last symptom to disappear after remission of depression, and can leave people with depression stuck in a cycle of recovery and relapse if the insomnia symptoms cannot be managed or treated. The weighted blankets are potentially an add-on non-pharmacological treatment improving sleep for these patients.

“With that particular cohort, the cognitive behavioural side of sleep can be helped - the patient can see the blanket as something that does work, and is known to work and assist them,” he said. “It can help with the negative feedback that occurs when you cannot sleep.”