Sleep is not disrupted by exercise in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, 2010, Togo et al

Sleep is not disrupted by exercise in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome

Fumiharu Togo, Benjamin H Natelson, Neil S Cherniack, Marc Klapholz, David M Rapoport, Dane B Cook

Published: 2010

Purpose
Patients with CFS report that exertion produces dramatic symptom worsening. We hypothesized this might be due to exacerbation of an underlying sleep disorder which we have previously demonstrated to exist.

Methods
Female patients with CFS and matched healthy controls with no evidence of major depressive disorder were studied with overnight polysomnography on a baseline night and on a night following their performing a maximal exercise test.

Results
CFS patients as a group had evidence for disturbed sleep compared to controls. While exercise improved sleep for healthy subjects, it did not do this for the group as a whole. When we stratified the sample based on self-reported sleepiness after a night's sleep, the patient group with reduced AM sleepiness showed improvement in sleep structure while those with increased AM sleepiness continued to show evidence for sleep disruption.

Conclusion
Sleep is disturbed in CFS patients as a group, but exercise does not further exacerbate this sleep disturbance. Approximately half the patients studied actually sleep better after exercise. Therefore, activity-related symptom worsening is not caused by worsened sleep.

Link | PDF (Med Sci Sports Exerc.) [Open Access]

 

CFS also selected for here using the Fukuda criteria.

 

It’s a rambling paper. They go way beyond the evidence as well.

Some «highlight»:

Because exercise training is recognized as an important and efficacious treatment option for many patients (1), it is important to understand the degree to which acute exercise influences other debilitating aspects of CFS.

(…)​

Patients fulfilled the 1994 case definition for CFS (4) and thus had no medical explanation for their symptoms based on history, physical examination or lab tests and no serious psychiatric diagnoses including schizophrenia, eating disorders, substance abuse.

(…)​

A visual analog scale (0–15.5 cm) was used to estimate perceived sleepiness, fatigue, pain, and feeling blue before and after each PSG recording. Visual analogue scales have consistently been shown to provide valid measures of subjective feelings (8,14).

(…)​

On the morning after exercise, healthy controls reported significantly less sleepiness (p = 0.008) and fatigue (p = 0.048) than following the post exercise night. In contrast, on that morning, patients reported no change in their sleepiness and an actual small but significant increase in fatigue than on their baseline night (p = 0.014).

(…)​

Since exercise did not produce a significant worsening of sleep morphology in CFS, the complaints of symptom worsening which are reported to occur the next day after exertion cannot be explained by disruption in sleep. Following exercise, approximately half the patients actually sleep better than on their baseline study night while the rest simply did not improve.

(…)​

Finding that exercise did not worsen sleep leads to two conclusions: first, that any ill effects of exercise are not due to altered sleep and second, that exercise does not have a deleterious effect on sleep and in fact, helps it in some CFS patients. This latter finding should prove important in helping patients deal with increasing their activity without worrying about negative health consequences.

 

To me it sounds like looking at some random spots and seeing some patterns which get some dramatic theory applied to those imaginary patterns. Modern astrology.