Background: Sleep deprivation has been shown to improve depressive symptoms in some patients with major depressive disorder, but it has not been tested in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) or social phobia (SP).
Methods: To determine if sleep deprivation altered anxiety or depressive symptoms in patients with GAD (n = 7) or SP (n = 8), we sleep deprived patients and normal controls (n = 18) for one night.
Results: On one measure of anxiety, GAD patients improved compared with controls, but there were otherwise no significant change differences between controls and SP or GAD patients.
Conclusions: The lack of benefit is consistent with previous findings that sleep deprivation provides no benefit to patients with other anxiety disorders. Sleep deprivation may be a biological intervention that distinguishes anxiety from affective disorders.