Predicting long-term sickness absence from sleep and fatigue
Two pages on PainSci cite Akerstedt 2007: 1. The Insomnia Guide for Chronic Pain Patients 2. Insomnia Until it Hurts
PainSci commentary on Akerstedt 2007: ?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided wherever possible.
This is a statistical analysis of insomnia’s relationship to absences from work caused by illness. They identified a clear connection and concluded that “disturbed sleep and fatigue are predictors of long-term absence [from work due to sickness] and it is suggested that impaired sleep may be part of a chain of causation, considering its effects on fatigue.”
original abstract †Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
This is a statistical analysis of the relationship between insomnia, fatigue, and illness. 8300 people were studied in two consecutive years. The researchers compared reports of disturbed sleep and fatigue in the first year to data from the next year on absence from work due to serious illness. People with disturbed sleep initially were at least 25% more likely to miss a lot of work later on. They concluded that “disturbed sleep and fatigue are predictors of long-term absence [from work due to sickness] and it is suggested that impaired sleep may be part of a chain of causation, considering its effects on fatigue.”
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- Classical Conditioning Fails to Elicit Allodynia in an Experimental Study with Healthy Humans. Madden 2017 Pain Med.
- Topical glyceryl trinitrate (GTN) and eccentric exercises in the treatment of mid-portion achilles tendinopathy (the NEAT trial): a randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trial. Kirwan 2024 Br J Sports Med.
- Placebo analgesia in physical and psychological interventions: Systematic review and meta-analysis of three-armed trials. Hohenschurz-Schmidt 2024 Eur J Pain.
- Recovery trajectories in common musculoskeletal complaints by diagnosis contra prognostic phenotypes. Aasdahl 2021 BMC Musculoskelet Disord.
- Cannabidiol (CBD) products for pain: ineffective, expensive, and with potential harms. Moore 2023 J Pain.