Differentiation Across Bipolar Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder by Whole-Night Polysomnographic Findings

Meihong Xiu, PhD; Wenxin Li, MS; Yu Lan, MS; Kaiwen Li, MS; Xiaoe Lang, MD, PhD

J Clin Psychiatry. 2024;85(3):23m15210

Abstract

Background: There is growing evidence that understanding the role of sleep disturbance in bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) is helpful when studying the high heterogeneity of patients across psychiatric disorders.

Objective: The present study was designed to investigate the transdiagnostic role of sleep disturbance measured by polysomnography (PSG) in differentiating from MDD with BD.

Methods: A total of 256 patients with MDD and 107 first-episode and never medicated patients with BD using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, criteria were recruited. All patients completed 1 night of PSG recording, and the changes in objective sleep structure parameters were determined by PSG analysis.

Results: We showed that patients with MDD had statistically longer rapid eye movement (REM) latency, a higher percentage of stage N2 sleep, and lower percentages of stage N3 sleep and REM sleep than those with BD after controlling for confounding factors (all P < .05). Moreover, using the logistic regression analysis, we identified that REM latency was associated with BD diagnosis among the PSG sleep features. The cutoff value for PSG characteristics to differentiate BD from MDD was 261 in REM latency (sensitivity: 41.4% and specificity: 84.1%).

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that PSG-measured sleep abnormalities, such as reduced REM latency, may be a diagnostic differentiating factor between MDD and BD, indicating their roles in identifying homogeneous transdiagnostic subtypes across psychiatric disorders.

J Clin Psychiatry 2024;85(3):23m15210

Author affiliations are listed at the end of this article.

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