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Veterans who sustain mild traumatic brain injuries, also called concussions, are 49 percent more likely to develop sleep disorders up to five years after these injuries, according to a study published in March 2021 in
“Sleep complaints are common in TBI patients, so the association itself is not surprising,” says the lead study author, Yue Leng, MD, PhD, a psychiatry researcher and an assistant professor at the University of California in San Francisco.
“It is fascinating that there is an increased risk of sleep disorders even years after TBI, not only short-term,” Dr. Leng says.
For the study, researchers examined data on almost 200,000 Iraq and Afghanistan-era veterans, roughly half of whom had been diagnosed with a brain injury. Over an average follow-up period of almost five years, 23.4 percent of the veterans with TBIs developed sleep disorders, compared with 15.8 percent of the veterans without TBIs.