Using Sleep as a Window into Early Brain Recovery from Alcoholism.

IT IS NOW well-known that sleep disturbances are highly prevalent during alcohol abuse and dependence. These sleep disturbances persist well into the period of abstinence and may be associated with relapse (for review, see Brower, 2015). Over at least the last 4 decades (Wagman and Allen, 1975), researchers have been exploring how withdrawal from alcohol affects sleep by examining electrophysiological characteristics of the sleeping brain. Polysomnographically (PSG) defined sleep stages (macroarchitecture) and specific waveforms (microarchitecture) from the sleep electroencephalogram provide a window into the neurochemical changes of the brain induced by alcohol (Brower, 2015; Colrain et al., 2014; Conroy et al., 2010). The report by Willoughby and colleagues (2015) adds to this literature by examining a major component of the event related potential response in sleep, the K-complex (KC). In their manuscript, “Partial K-complex recovery following short-term abstinence in individuals with alcohol use disorder” the authors find that recently abstinent individuals (n = 16) with alcohol use disorder (AUD) had lower KC amplitude and incidence compared with gender-and agematched controls (n = 13) (Willoughby et al., 2015). Moreover, the KC amplitude in AUD participants increased significantly from baseline to the follow-up 1 month later, but did not change frommonth 1 to 3. The age of the sample was in the early 40s, and the genders were fairly split between males and females. This study is one of only a few to examine changes in sleep over time in recovering alcoholics (see Table 1).