China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences

Insomnia belongs to the category of"sleepless"in Chinese medicine. Sleepless is defined as a persistent sleep disorder, results in some form of daytime impairment.

Traditional Chinese medicine(TCM) has obvious advantages in the treatment of chronic insomnia, but there have some subjective and objective obstacles in the advantages of TCM treatment of replication, promotion, and popularization. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out the research from a multi-angle, and further summarize the ideas and methods from the perspective of TCM, to make it more objective, visual and standardized.

Insomnia is a clinical manifestation of the disorders of the Zang and Fu, and it can further aggravate the dysfunction of the Zang and Fu. The Traditional Chinese medicine believes that, outward is the internal manifestation. Infrared image can reflect the state of cold and heat, yin and yang in all parts of human body. So it is called the CT of TCM. Pre-study found that patients with sleep disorders have different infrared image than normal changes. Polysomnography is currently recognized as the golden indicator of sleep research. Polysomnography can monitor the whole sleep process, and study the sleep structure by the related indexes, which is a basic technique for Sleep medical research and diagnosis of sleep disorders, and a standard method of evaluating sleep-related pathophysiology and sleep architecture. We will study the relationship between sleep structure of the PSG, the characteristics of infrared image, the four diagnostic information of TCM, and the self-rating scales of sleep and psychology in patients with chronic insomnia.