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Revolutionary Cure for Insomnia

Insomnia is one of the worlds most common ailments, yet little research has been done in to finding a long term cure for this surprisingly serious ailment.  Over in Australia the problem is all the more severe, with over 30% of Australians suffering from insomnia in one form or another the scientists at Flinders university decided to start solving the problem by forming the Sleep Research Laboratory.  At the Sleep Research Laboratory they have been working for some time on everything from drugs to pshyciatric help.

After only finding small success with these results they finally found that revolutionary breakthrough they were waiting for.  the only problem is, it’s technically illegal under the Geneva convention.

the treatment they have found has an astounding success rate, and involves depriving the patient of sleep for days at a time.  Every time the patient drops into a full sleep they are woken up after 4 minutes.  This treatment trains the body to go through the initial sleeping stage, where most insomnia sufferers have the most problems.  After this has been repeated over 40 times the patient is finally allowed to drop off

TRANSCRIPT

Narration: Lynn Valentine is a chronic insomniac. It’s now 2:30AM and Lynn’s finally fallen asleep- but she’s in for a rude shock. She’s being woken up. Again, and again.

Lyn Valentine: I’m starting to get very tired now.

Narration: It looks like torture. But could this radical experiment, revolutionise how we treat insomnia? Lynn is one of 30% of Australians who suffer insomnia. For 20 years, her hours of darkness have been a waking nightmare.

Lynn Valentine: It takes me perhaps one to two hours to sleep and then I wake up a number of times in the course of a night for longish periods of time. So I might have an aggregate of only four hours or five hours sleep, but very very broken sleep. It’s difficult to concentrate the next day. You feel quite tired, irritable. It has a big effect on mood. So it creates problems, quite significant problems.

Narration: Lynn’s tried sleeping pills, but found them dangerously addictive. Now, she’s ready to try anything. She’s volunteered to test an extreme new experimental treatment, here at Flinders University. The clock’s about to start ticking on 24 hours of severe sleep deprivation.

“Just sit up for now, you’ll be fine. Now imagine that you’re lying at home, in your own bed.”

This room has no windows, no doors – no way of knowing how much time is passing. While she lies in isolation, the researchers monitor Lynn’s temperature, skin conductance, and brainwaves.

Dr Leon Lack: What we look at is specifically alpha waves which are the green ones, so when you actually fall asleep the alpha waves will drop off.

Narration: These measures will tell them if Lyn drops off.

Jonica Newby: What happens if she falls asleep?

Jodie Harris: If she does fall asleep, I’ll let her fall asleep for four minutes & then wake her up again. She gets four minutes at each trial

Jonica Newby: 4 minutes?
Jodie Harris: 4 minutes that’s all.
Jonica Newby: Isn’t that against the Geneva convention?
Jodie Harris: It does sound a little bit like torture I know.

Narration: And right now, Lynn’s got 24 hours more of being woken up to go. The idea for this therapeutic torment came from Professor Leon Lack. He’s head of the Sleep Research Laboratory, and over the years, he’d become frustrated with existing treatments for insomnia. The big obstacle to treatment is that insomniacs have lost the ability to fall asleep. Instead of feeling sleepy, they’ve come to associate bed time with being highly alert.

Dr Leon Lack: They’ll be tossing and turning getting anxious that they still have to wake up the next morning at say 7 o’clock, now it’s 1 o’clock now it’s 1.30 now it’s 2 o’clock. It means they’ll get less and less sleep the longer they’re awake. They get more anxious about that and that then reinforces that automatic arousal response.

Narration: For the last 20 years, the main therapy for insomnia has tried to re-train people to fall asleep quickly.

Dr Leon Lack: The instructions of that therapy are don’t go to bed till you’re really sleepy and if you don’t fall asleep quickly get out of bed again and go back to bed when you’re sleepy again.

Narration: The problem is, few people persevere. They have to do it by themselves, at home. And on cold winters night, especially, they struggle to drag themselves out of bed.
And the training takes at least four weeks to work. That’s because you only practice, or trial, falling asleep once per night.

Dr Leon Lack: That’s only one trial, only one trial to reverse this experience of years and years of having difficulty. It takes more than one trial. It takes you know 30 or 40 or 50 trials.

But suddenly, it struck Leon, there could be an answer. Might it be possible to run all 50 sleep training sessions in just 24 hours?

Dr Leon Lack: They would experience a lot of sleep deprivation across that one day, but they would get a lot of trials every half hour.

Narration: Excited by the idea, he decided to put it to the test. Lynn is now 15 hours into the gruelling regime Leon devised. The key is to let patients fall asleep, then quickly wake them up, and keep them awake, until the next sleep training attempt. So far, Lynn’s been woken up 30 times. Yet surprisingly, far from suffering, she almost seems to be enjoying it.

Lynn Valentine: If I can continue to fall asleep the way I am at the moment that will be quite wonderful.

Narration: Far from feeling tortured, says Leon, insomniacs can actually find this experience exhilarating. For the first time, they realise they can learn to fall asleep. At the beginning of the trial, Lynn was taking more than 20 minutes to fall asleep. Now she’s taking just a few minutes.

Dr Leon Lack: The way they feel is that sleep is something that they’ve lost. Now you know in a short period of time we’ve shown them that they in fact can fall asleep really quickly under the right conditions.

Narration: But by Sunday evening even Lynn is starting to show the strain.

Jonica Newby: Fed Up?
Lynn Valentine: Lying around for what must it be now a day and a half. But don’t think it’s much longer to go before I get to go to sleep.

Narration: Finally at 8:00PM, after nearly 50 wake-ups Lynn is allowed to drift off into her first deep sleep. It’s a relief for her, but for the research team, this is the exciting bit. So far, 17 people have been through the trial. Preliminary results show most of them have vastly improved sleep following the treatment. It’s early days. But Leon hopes this could be a genuine breakthrough.

Dr Leon Lack: This promises to be a long-term cure to insomnia so they can leave it behind and for the rest of their life they won’t be plagued with the daytime tiredness which they now experience.

Narration: Last night was certainly a breakthrough for Lynn. She slept uninterrupted through the whole night.

Lynn Valentine: :I had a very sound nights sleep it was lovely…..8 0r 9 hours…I haven’t slept this long since I don’t know when.

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