![]() They also have irregular eating habits, and their weights fluctuate. They fall asleep during the day but stay awake at night. Some Alzheimer’s patients have erratic sleep schedules. This situation will lead to a deterioration of the brain or Alzheimer’s disease. However, when the brain is rested during sleep, there is a process to remove these excesses properly but this requires a quality sleep that is appropriate to the person’s age.įor a person who has problem sleeping – for example, taking a long time to fall asleep, suffering from insomnia, or lacking quality sleep (e.g., snoring, sleep apnea, teeth grinding, tossing and turning, sleep-talking, or keeping irregular sleep schedule) – the body will create more of the neurological discards and, as they cannot be effectively removed, accumulate them in the brain. Frequently found in this type of waste are remanence of tau protein and traces of amyloid beta. On the other hand, as the brain functions and draws energy from neurons, it creates and accumulate something that may be considered neurological discards that cause impediment to the neuron stream. The longer we remain awake, the more energy our brains drain. The brain, therefore, requires sufficient amount of energy for sustenance. “We believe that uncovering the control mechanisms of thalamic neurons during sleep and wake will be key to finding new sleep therapies in an increasingly sleep-deprived society.In everyday life, our brains have to deal with a lot of activities in thoughts and in response to other stimuli. The study’s senior author also weighs in on the clinical significance of the findings. “Interestingly,” explains Gent, “we were also able to show that suppression of thalamic neuronal activity impaired the recovery from sleep loss, suggesting that these neurons are essential for a restful sleep after extended period of being awake.” To the authors’ knowledge, this was the first time that a study has revealed that a single brain area promotes both sleep and wakefulness. REM and non-REM sleep are the two main sleep phases the former is the stage during which we dream, while the latter is the deep, restorative sleep. However, using slow stimuli in a rhythmic way induced a deep, non-rapid eye movement ( REM) sleep in the mice, as measured by an electroencephalogram. In this study, the researchers used prolonged stimuli to activate these neurons, which woke up the rodents. The thalamus is also involved in mood regulation and states of arousal, or consciousness. In this case, the scientists modified neurons in the rodents’ thalamus, or the brain area responsible for relaying sensory information to the cortex. Optogenetics is a technique in which neurons are genetically modified to respond to light. Adamantidis and team used optogenetics to selectively switch neurons on and off in mice’s brains. The findings, which may pave the way for new sleep therapies, were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Thomas Gent, a researcher in the same department, is the first author of the paper. Antoine Adamantidis, of the Department of Neurology at Inselspital. Scientists from the Department of BioMedical Research at the University of Bern and the Department of Neurology at Inselspital, Bern University Hospital - both in Switzerland - find neurons that control both sleep and wakefulness. New research has turned this hypothesis on its head. Until now, it was believed that our brain uses several regions to alternate between sleep and wakefulness.įor instance, a popular hypothesis maintains that the cerebral cortex - that is, the upper part of the brain that can be found right beneath the skull - “emits” sleep-inducing slow brain waves, whereas wakefulness is controlled by the lower, mammalian part of our brain. This prompted the CDC to deem sleep deprivation a “public health epidemic,” urging researchers to come up with new sleep therapies and unlock the mystery of how our brain induces the restful state. They also found that over 35 percent of them do not get the minimum 7 hours that an adult needs for optimal health. Share on Pinterest As an adult, you should sleep for at least 7 hours each night for optimal health.įrom raising the risk of both hypertension and obesity to making depression and cancer more likely, sleep deprivation can harm our immune system just as much as our mental well-being.Ī survey carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that 50 to 70 million adults in the United States have chronic sleep disorders. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |