The Impact of the Years of Blindness on Sleep and Dreaming Processes and the Relationships With Spatial Abilities

Launched by ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA · Oct 7, 2024

Keywords

ClinConnect Summary

BLINDREAM is an observational study that explores how years of blindness affect sleep, dreams, and spatial abilities. It compares adults who are blind or severely visually impaired with similar adults who have normal vision. Researchers will look at how sleep is organized, how your body’s daily sleep-wake rhythm works (measured by sleep tests, movement tracking, and saliva melatonin), and how often and what people dream about. They will also test spatial perception and memory to see if these sleep and dream patterns relate to everyday skills. The study aims to enroll about 40 people, with roughly 20 in each group. To be eligible, adults need to be 18–85 years old; blindness can be present from birth or start later, but vision must be very limited. Controls must be adults without vision problems and matched by age and sex.

If you take part, you’ll go through several steps over a period that includes a one-night home sleep test, about a week of wearing a sleep-tracking wrist device, and periodic saliva samples for melatonin analysis. You’ll also complete sleep and dream questionnaires and keep a dream diary, plus have one session of neuropsychological tests to measure spatial skills. This is purely research, not a diagnostic test or treatment, and there are no medicines involved. Results are not yet available, but the findings may help researchers understand how blindness affects sleep and dreams and could lead to new ways to support spatial abilities and daily functioning in the future.

Gender

ALL

Eligibility criteria

• Inclusion Criteria:
• • Signature of the informed consent;
• • The participating subjects may have typical or atypical development (i.e., group with visual disability). In the case of visual impairment, the disability should be congenital (from birth) or late onset. Furthermore, the following requirements must be met: subjects with visual disabilities must be classified according to current diagnostic rules, with visual problems present from birth or occurring later, with residual vision lower than 1.3 LogMAR;
• • Age range required is ≥ 18 years old and ≤ 85 years old;
• • Any Gender;
• • Any ethnicity, as long as a good knowledge of the Italian language.
• Exclusion Criteria:
• * Participant with a disability/condition/comorbidity that prevents participation and/or does not guarantee the safety of the patient during the execution of the tests and/or does not guarantee the quality/reliability of the data:
• • Tactile and/or acoustic hypersensitivity (specifically, the tolerance of the equipment will be assessed);
• • Deafness;
• • Taking drugs and neuroactive substances and having taken them in the last six months;
• • Comorbidity with another clinically significant and uncontrolled pathology;
• • Being affected, to the best of their knowledge, by pathologies of the central nervous system, and having suffered from epileptic episodes, even minor ones, and convulsive crises in general;
• • Being affected, to the best of their knowledge, by cardio-respiratory pathologies that can influence the macro and microstructure of sleep.
• • Lack of signature of consent or incomplete consent to acknowledge the incompatibilities for participation in the study;
• • To the best of their knowledge, IQ values lower than the threshold limit of normality according to one of the recognized international scales.
• • Pregnant women