Summary
Twenty Ss received, double blind, either a 15-mg dextroamphetamine sulfate (DA) spansule and pentobarbital (PB) 100 mg p.o. before bed on two nights or PB and a placebo (PL) on two other nights, all a week apart, in a balanced design. Fifteen of the Ss received DA and PB placebos on two additional nights. EEG and EOG recordings were obtained over a six-hour observation period on all nights.
DA + PB produced more body movements, spontaneous awakenings and stage-2 sleep and less delta sleep (stages 3 + 4) than did PB, while PB reduced time to sleep onset and produced less body movements and spontaneous awakenings than did PL. These findings were thought to indicate that DA decreases “soundness” and “depth” of sleep while PB increases them.
A decrease in emergent stage-1 sleep (activated sleep, AS) over the six-hour observation period with DA + PB was made up for by a corresponding increase in wakefulness (stage 0), while a decrease both in AS and stage 0 with PB was compensated for by a corresponding increase in nonactivated sleep (NAS).
Both DA + PB reduced per cent AS sleep time and first AS period (ASP) latencies, DA + PB more markedly than PB. DA appeared to produce this effect primarily by increasing first ASP latencies, while PB did so as well by shortening the first two ASPs.
The tendency of PB to reduce rapid eye-movement (REM) density within ASPs (DA did not do so), to produce periods of emergent stage 1 without REMs, to shorten ASPs without changing the intervals between successive ASPs and to produce a maximum in the concentration of body movements in the 60–90 min interval after sleep onset suggested that it does not induce a basic alteration in the sleep cycle but rather suppresses certain manifestations of the first ASP (REMs and stage-1 sleep), while leaving others, such as body movements, unchanged to persist as a “REM-period residue.” Since DA was always administered with PB, it is not clear by what mechanisms the former delayed the appearance of first ASPs.
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This study was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, United States Public Health Service, nos. MH-23,901, MH-10088 and MH-7336.
This paper is based in part on a thesis submitted to the Department of Psychiatry, Graduate Educational Program, State University of New York, Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Medical Science.
Drs. Donald R. Goodenough and Arthur Shapiro gave helpful advice in both the design of this experiment and the data analysis.
Abbott Laboratories provided the pentobarbital (Nembutal) placebos, and Smith, Kline and French Laboratories furnished the dextroamphetamine sulfate (Dexedrine) placebos.
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Baekeland, F. Pentobarbital and dextroamphetamine sulfate: Effects on the sleep cycle in man. Psychopharmacologia 11, 388–396 (1967). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00405022
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00405022