A Study Of The Relationship Between Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation And Sleep

During the whole life we spend one third of time sleeping. Sleep can store energy,recuperate spirits,relieve stress and it can also consolidate memories. But with the increasing life pressure and a strong overworking culture in modern society, people has less time to sleep and the sleep quality has been decreased. So a growing number of researchers have studied how to make a good change to our sleep.In the 1960 s, researchers had tried to find whether there were some ways to improve our sleep. Until now researchers have already found many sleep medicines and non-drug interferences that could improve our sleep, however most of them have side effects on human body. Here we tried another method to improve sleep. It is called the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation(TENS). And this method has been proved efficient in pain treatment. This thesis would like to detect whether TENS could be used as a means of sleep intervention.In this thesis we designed two different conditions for studying the relationship between TENS and sleep. One was a 30 min TENS stimulation at Shenmen at bedtime. In this condition, we choose a place which is 10 cm above the Shenmen as a reference. The other was a 30 min sham stimulation. The instrument was not opened at this condition. We compared the sleep electroencephalogram parameters in these two different situations in order to find whether TENS can change sleep structure. And we also designed two cognitive tests and compared the results of cognitive tests in two different conditions. This compare could help us to check whether TENS was safety or not. Using TENS, we show decreased S1 sleep, spindle number and spindle density compared to Sham. The power density between 12.25 and 12.65 Hz and in the later two cycles of sleep increased significantly in TENS than in Sham. Compared with Sham, performance changes of paired-word test in TENS condition was improved a lot. And the DSST performance did not different between the two conditions. These two results suggest that TENS is a safe treatment since it do not have harmful effect on our cognition.This thesis studied the relationship between TENS and sleep through the compare of electroencephalogram waveforms in two different sleep situations. And we also examined whether TENS had bad effects on the cognitive capacity. We hope our results could help the researchers explore the therapeutic range of TENS and could give some new ideas to the sleep intervention field.