Нарушение циркадных ритмов у больных шизофренией

In order to take a systematic look at the circadian rhythms of people with schizophrenia, Foster and his colleagues recruited 20 people with the disease and instructed them to wear movement-detecting wristwatches for six weeks. The amount of motion detected can be analyzed to determine whether the person is asleep or awake, given the vastly different movement patterns between the two states.
The patients also filled out questionnaires and kept daily diaries of their sleep and activities. All of the patients were taking medication to control their symptoms, and they had all been stable on that medication for at least three months. Finally, the patients gave 48 hours work of urine samples to be tested for melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep (melatonin makes a person sleepy).
For comparison, the researchers asked another 21 mentally healthy but unemployed adults to wear the same watches and keep the same records as the people with schizophrenia. Unemployed people were chosen because the patients with schizophrenia were all unemployed, and employment can alter sleep patterns by forcing people to get up with an alarm clock.

A comparison between the two groups revealed that while unemployed people keep fairly regular sleep hours, every person with schizophrenia in the sample had a sleep problem.
"What became very clear is that they are massively and completely disrupted," Foster said.
This disruption did not follow a common pattern. Some people with schizophrenia went to bed late and got up late, with their melatonin release patterns delayed by several hours compared with healthy counterparts. Others would get up later and later every day, their circadian rhythms "drifting" through time. The most severely affected showed no normal 24-hour sleep-wake pattern at all. They'd alternate sleep and activity throughout the day and night.

The results weren't the result of unemployment, because the unemployed-but-healthy group did not show them. Nor could they be linked to any specific medication or dosage level, Foster said.

Better Sleep May Help Improve Schizophrenia