Friday, September 06, 2013

Lack Of Sleep Could Aggravate Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis

According to Chiara Cirelli, MD, PhD, at the University of Wisconsin, and who is currently conducting a study on sleep, future experiments may very well examine whether or not an association between sleep patterns and severity of MS symptoms exists.

Although it has been known that many genes are turned on during sleep and off during periods of wakefulness, how sleep affects specific cell types has been unknown.

Dr Cirelli and her collegues are conducting a study on how sleep affects specific cells types.
In experiments on mice, they found that genes promoting myelin formation were turned on during sleep and the genes implicated in cell death and the cellular stress response were turned on when the animals stayed awake.

According to Dr Mehdi Tafti from Lausanne University, who also studies sleep, these findings hint at how sleep or lack of sleep might repair or damage the brain.

Myelin is the insulating material on nerve cells found in the brain and spinal cord and protects them, a bit like insulation around an electrical wire.
Multiple Sclerosis or MS is a disease that damages myelin and anything that help promote myelin formation would be a breakthrough for the disease.

Cirelli speculated that the findings suggest that extreme and/or chronic sleep loss could possibly aggravate some symptoms of multiple sclerosis and felt a future study was warranted to examine this.

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