A Study Of The Attention Networks In Patients With Primary Insomnia

Purpose: Primary insomnia is characterised as difficulty in initiating, maintainingsleep or unrestored sleep lasted more than1months, which exclude other physicaldiseases or substance misuse. Attention is a basic function for ensuring normalpsychophysiologic activities and is also an important element of cognition. Theattention network theory divide attention into alerting, orienting, executive network.Therefore, the current paper will use the attention network test to inspect the attentionnetwork function of the patients with primary insomnia, to investigated the features ofattention, as well as to investigate the involved physiological and biochemicalmechanisms.Method: Thirty patients with primary insomnia who were receiving treatment in theNeurology Dept. of First Affiliated Hospital of Dalian Medical University during July,2013to March,2014, including8men and22women. MMSE is used for screening andPSQI and HAMA are used to assess clinical symptoms. Besides, thirty normal sleepershave been selected to make a comparative study. For all participants, a desktopcomputer is used to make the attention network test; record the reaction time; computethe efficiencies of the alerting network, orienting network and executive network;calculate the mean of the reaction time; and figure out the accuracy. The alertingnetwork efficiency, orienting network efficiency, executive network efficiency, meanreaction time and accuracy of PI and NS group are compared and analyzed by usingSPSS20.0.Results: When compared to normal sleepers, the patients’ attention functions arenormal, and there is no significant difference (P>0.05) in alerting network efficiency, orienting network efficiency, executive network efficiency, mean reaction time andaccuracy. For the PI group, Pearson correlation analysis shows a negative correlationbetween the alerting network efficiency and age (r=—0.467, P=0.009), but the orientingand executive network efficiencies are not significantly correlated to age (P>0.05). Forthe NS group, the three network efficiencies are not significantly correlated to age(P>0.05). There is also no significant correlation between PI’s three network efficienciesand disease course, PSQI and HAMA (P>0.05).Conclusions: PI patients’ attention function and their alerting, orienting andexecutive function networks are normal. This may be contributed by the dissociation ofsubjective and objective symptoms, high physiological alertness, selective attention andcompensatory reaction. The alerting network of PI patients is negatively correlated toage. Application of more precise methods (such as EPP, FMRI) for testing cognitiveprocessing, or assessing measures may be efficient ways to study the abnormal attentionfunction of PI patients.