Relationship between sleep and pain is not what we think

Dr David Klyne fits Wolbert van den Hoorn with a sleep monitoring device on his head

Dr David Klyne fits Dr Wolbert van den Hoorn with a sleep monitoring device.

2 October 2024

A University of Queensland study investigating the links between sleep and pain could fundamentally change the way doctors and clinicians treat people with chronic pain.

Dr David Klyne from UQ’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences has received a UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award for his work into how sleep influences pain recovery.

“Poor sleep coexists with chronic pain in up to 90 per cent of cases,” Dr Klyne said.

“Up until recently it’s been thought pain causes poor sleep, but our research suggests it’s the other way around - that poor sleep worsens and potentially maintains pain.”

“For example, if you’re experiencing acute pain caused by injury, we’ve shown how well you recover depends on how well you sleep.

“Worse sleep primes the nervous and immune systems to enhance pain and potentially drive the development of chronic pain.

“If we can establish that poor sleep contributes to the development of chronic pain, then we’ll be able to focus on developing and refining sleep treatments for the purpose of preventing chronic pain.”

“This work could fundamentally shift the way our health system considers sleep in the context of pain.”

The award will help progress Dr Klyne’s study to clinical trials, where his team will use head devices to monitor sleep patterns in chronic pain patients, while also conducting blood and saliva tests to look at patients’ hormonal, neural and immune responses.

“We’ll observe how their nervous and immune systems respond to a period of good sleep and a period of poor disrupted sleep, which will be achieved by participants setting alarms at intermittent times throughout the night,” he said.

“We’ll also be examining if and how different sleep patterns – such as deep sleep and light sleep – impact recovery differently.

“For example, disrupted or loss of deep sleep might influence someone’s recovery far more than loss of light sleep.”

Dr Klyne said chronic pain affected at least 20 percent of the world’s population.

“It’s the biggest unresolved health issue of our time and it causes more disability than cancer and heart disease combined,” he said.

“Sleep as a treatment for pain is largely overlooked, but our research is trying to change that.

“If we can increase our understanding about the relationship between sleep and pain, we can hopefully encourage more clinicians to consider sleep as a legitimate treatment for patients with pain.”

This project is part of Dr Klyne’s work on how lifestyle factors influence pain.

His team is currently recruiting for a study to examine how back pain symptoms are influenced by biology, psychology, sociology, behaviour and lifestyle.