Neuropathy And Sleep Problems Connections

If you suffer from neuropathy, chances are that you’re also having trouble sleeping.

Pretty straightforward, right? Pain stops you from sleeping.

But a new study in the Journal of Cancer Survivorship dug a little bit deeper into this issue and revealed some very interesting findings.

A lot of research has been done on the outcomes that neuropathy patients can expect, such as pain, sensitivity to temperature, sensitivity to pressure, and so on. But the authors of this new study noticed that fairly little research had been performed on the sleep quality of people with peripheral neuropathy.

They decided to study this relationship and, because neuropathy is fairly common among cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, they recruited their participants from this population.

They enrolled 343 colorectal cancer patients from four Dutch hospitals. They made sure that all of the patients suffered from the same type of cancer so that the cancer type and differing treatments would not influence their results.

They gave these participants two questionnaires: the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index to obtain information about their sleep quality, and another to obtain information about the presence and level of neuropathy.

The patients completed these questionnaires when they were first diagnosed with cancer before their treatment had started, and then one year after their diagnoses and again two years after their diagnoses.

There were 76 subjects with sensory neuropathy and 79 with motor neuropathy after one year, along with 45 patients who had sensory neuropathy and another 45 with motor neuropathy after two years.

With sensory neuropathy, the sensory nerves that receive sensations from the skin are affected. With motor neuropathy, the nerves that control muscle movement are affected.

In the former, the most common symptoms are numbness, tingling, and pain. In the latter, patients most commonly struggle with cramping and difficulty in handling objects.

In general, the researchers found an improvement in sleep for those who did not have neuropathy from the beginning until two years after diagnosis, while the sleep of those with neuropathy did not improve over the same period.

Think about it: you can expect that most people don’t sleep very well just after a cancer diagnosis. They feel sick, they are stressed, and the treatment often makes them feel worse. According to the literature, somewhere between 30 and 50% of newly diagnosed cancer patients sleep poorly.

But as all these issues start to come under control, patients start to sleep again—hence the improvement in sleep quality for those without neuropathy.

But this did not happen for those with neuropathy.

1. 17% more sensory neuropathy patients slept worse after one year and 15% slept worse after two years when compared to those without neuropathy.

2. 13% more motor neuropathy patients slept worse after one year and 23% slept worse after two years when compared to those without neuropathy.

The differences were especially stark in the specific sleep aspects of sleep latency and daytime dysfunction, and in their composite global sleep quality scores.

In other words, people with neuropathy struggled to fall asleep, functioned poorly during the day, and reported more sleep disturbances and worse sleep quality.

This shows how important it is to treat your neuropathy before it starts to affect your sleep.

So add better sleep to the long list of benefits of healing neuropathy. And fortunately, healing neuropathy is quite simple if you apply the simple lifestyle changes explained here…

And if you have a trouble sleeping, then you’ll be thrilled to hear that this simple trick knocks people out in 10 minutes…