What’s more, study of EEG tracings can help us monitor the way a patient is responding to treatment. Many antidepressant medications serve to suppress REM sleep—in fact, REM suppression may be one of the mechanisms by which such drugs work. (Interestingly, depressed patients also show improvement when they are deprived of REM sleep merely by being awakened at those points in the sleep cycle.) A patient who experiences REM sleep immediately after dropping off is thought to be responding poorly to antidepressants and may need to try a combination of drugs. Similarly, some patients who may respond better to electroshock therapy tend to show much shorter onset of REM sleep than others. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future physicians will be able to diagnose and categorize a patient’s illness and prescribe appropriate therapy primarily on the basis of EEG sleep records.
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