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Vey excited to share our new (open access) paper on excessive sleepiness in psychosis! https://bit.ly/3ioXuRU - some of the main takeaways below… (be warned, enthusiasm ahead): 1/11
Excessive sleepiness is pretty common in patients with psychosis – everyone who works clinically knows this, but we can be guilty of saying 'its just sedation from medications' and moving on with our day….(2/11)
HOWEVER there are a bunch of other things that could be causing it – low mood, low activity, sleep problems - and these are treatable! (3/11)
AND whatever is causing it, the impacts are barely talked about – again, low mood, low activity, difficulty engaging in other treatments, among others – and these are important! (4/11)
To start getting a handle on this we compared patients with psychosis reporting excessive sleepiness (+/- long sleep times) to patients who weren’t on medication, sleep, activity, mood, psychotic symptoms . Sensible first step hopefully. (5/11)
The results were very interesting, and not what we expected. There were *no differences* between our groups in medication type or dosage, or in sleep duration. In fact both groups reported looong sleep duration, >9h. (6/11)
BUT the excessive sleepiness group did have lower activity levels, and higher levels of comorbid sleep disorders including insomnia - which, yes, of course can cause daytime sleepiness! (7/11)
Symptom results were interesting – no significant differences, so caution! - but data indicated our excessive sleepiness group had lower paranoia hallucinations, higher cognitive disorganisation and grandiosity, and similar depression and anxiety to comparison. (8/11)
Limitations: small sample, exploratory, cross-sectional, and categorising medications by how sedating they are supposed to be vs how antipsychotic they are supposed to be is not straightforward. (9/11)
Overall, this really fascinating profile from our (!)small, cross-sectional, and exploratory(!) study suggests that its worth looking in to excessive sleepiness more - inc. investigating effect of interventions on activity and other sleep disorders on daytime sleepiness (10/11)
Finally, brief milestone celebration as my PhD thesis is now 
fully published! A lot of credit is owed to my amazing supervisors @ProfDFreeman and @bryonysheaves for their wisdom and persistence in making me do things. Thank you to both of you - and all of OCAP! FIN.
fully published! A lot of credit is owed to my amazing supervisors @ProfDFreeman and @bryonysheaves for their wisdom and persistence in making me do things. Thank you to both of you - and all of OCAP! FIN.
