Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine say a new study shows how a treatment commonly used for insomnia can assist in calming a potentially violent sleeping disorder in which sufferers unknowingly act out their dreams while unconscious. Photo by Claudio Scott/Pixabay
May 26 (UPI) — Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine say a new study shows how a treatment commonly used for insomnia can assist in calming a potentially violent sleeping disorder in which sufferers unknowingly act out their dreams while asleep.
The study on the use of the sleep medication dual orexin receptor antagonist for rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder was published Thursday in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The receptor antagonists work by blocking orexin, a neuropeptide, or chemical messenger in the brain, that helps the body stay awake.
Mount Sinai researchers are calling the research as the first published data on a treatment for rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep behavior disorder. The researchers said this affects more than 3 million Americans, mostly adults over age 50.
It leads to victims physically acting out their dreams with vocal sounds or sudden, violent arm and leg movements during slumber, potentially causing significant injury to themselves or their bed partners.
Researchers said the disorder appears to develop because of neurodegeneration when brain cells lose function over time, and also associated with the accumulation of tau protein.
The study’s authors found that after administering a dual orexin receptor antagonist twice during a 24-hour period, to evaluate sleep in light and dark phases, they observed that the medication not only reduced the time it took to fall asleep and increased the quality and duration of sleep, but also reduced levels of dream enactment.
“We anticipated finding a breakdown of sleep quality with progressive neurodegeneration related to tau accumulation, but the observation of dream enactment was a surprise,” said lead author Korey Kam, assistant professor of medicine at Icahn Mount Sinai.
“It was even more surprising and exciting to observe that a dual orexin receptor antagonist could significantly minimize the dream enactment behaviors.”
The Mount Sinai researchers said they hope the findings will lead to future trials of dual orexin receptor antagonists to treat REM sleep behavior disorder in humans, given that the medication already is FDA-approved and available to treat people with insomnia.
