Could Your Nightmares Signal Something More Serious? New Study Links Them to THIS Diseases

Research has surfaced suggesting that nightmares and hallucinations could be early symptoms of autoimmune diseases.

The results of a study investigating the correlation between symptoms of nightmares and hallucinations and autoimmune diseases were published in eClinicalMedicine.

Autoimmune diseases occur when our body’s immune system attacks normal tissues or organs. Depending on the disease, the affected tissues or organs vary, and in many cases, multiple sites are affected. Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren’s syndrome, and systemic sclerosis are typical autoimmune diseases.

Researchers investigated the correlation between autoimmune diseases such as lupus and symptoms of nightmares and hallucinations, targeting 676 lupus patients and 69 patients with systemic autoimmune diseases, including lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune inflammatory disease that causes problems in various organs, including the brain.

As a result of in-depth interviews with the patients, sleep disorders related to nightmares were found in three out of five lupus patients. For one-third of them, these sleep disorders appeared one year before the onset of lupus. Less than a quarter showed hallucination symptoms. Of these, 85% occurred in the early stages of autoimmune disease onset.

The research team described the characteristic hallucination symptoms appearing in patients as daymares. This is because the hallucination symptoms appeared as if dreaming while awake.

The researchers announced that these nightmares and hallucination symptoms could be early symptoms of autoimmune diseases, including lupus, or could serve as a clue indicating these diseases.