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.
Showing posts with label lack of sleep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lack of sleep. Show all posts
Friday, September 06, 2013
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Does Lack Of Sleep Make You Fat?
A study conducted previously and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by researchers Christian Benedict and Helgi Schiöth, of the Department of Neuroscience at Uppsala University, showed that a single night of total sleep loss in young normal weight men increased levels of hunger, which indicated that an acute lack of sleep may affect a person's food perception.
In a new study, the same researchers from Uppsala University, tried to isolate the part of the brain that was affected by acute sleep loss. They showed that a specific brain region that contributes to a person's appetite sensation is more activated in response to food images after one night of sleep loss than after one night of normal sleep. Poor sleep habits can therefore affect people's risk of becoming overweight in the long run.
Christian Benedict says, "After a night of total sleep loss, these males showed a high level of activation in an area of the brain that is involved in a desire to eat. Bearing in mind that insufficient sleep is a growing problem in modern society, our results may explain why poor sleep habits can affect people's risk to gain weight in the long run. It may therefore be important to sleep about eight hours every night to maintain a stable and healthy body weight."
This study only involved 12 normal weight men and it seems a bit of an extrapolation to conclude that this would be the case in everyone, male or female, overweight or of normal weight. What's more researchers compared the results after a night with normal sleep with those obtained after one night without sleep, not reduced sleep, so I'm not sure where they got the 8 hours sleep from...
However I do think that common sense dictates that when you haven't slept well, you are more susceptible to eating badly and thus gain weight if this happens regularly.
In a new study, the same researchers from Uppsala University, tried to isolate the part of the brain that was affected by acute sleep loss. They showed that a specific brain region that contributes to a person's appetite sensation is more activated in response to food images after one night of sleep loss than after one night of normal sleep. Poor sleep habits can therefore affect people's risk of becoming overweight in the long run.
Christian Benedict says, "After a night of total sleep loss, these males showed a high level of activation in an area of the brain that is involved in a desire to eat. Bearing in mind that insufficient sleep is a growing problem in modern society, our results may explain why poor sleep habits can affect people's risk to gain weight in the long run. It may therefore be important to sleep about eight hours every night to maintain a stable and healthy body weight."
This study only involved 12 normal weight men and it seems a bit of an extrapolation to conclude that this would be the case in everyone, male or female, overweight or of normal weight. What's more researchers compared the results after a night with normal sleep with those obtained after one night without sleep, not reduced sleep, so I'm not sure where they got the 8 hours sleep from...
However I do think that common sense dictates that when you haven't slept well, you are more susceptible to eating badly and thus gain weight if this happens regularly.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
7 Hours Of Sleep May Be Optimal For Health
According to a study to investigate sleep patterns by Professor Franco Cappuccio, holder of the endowed Cephalon Chair in Cardiovascular Medicine and Epidemiology at Warwick Medical School in collaboration with with researchers at University College London 7 hours of sleep may be optimal for health.
Consistently sleeping less could have a detrimental effect on your health but apparently too much sleep may be as bad for us as too little.
A lack of sleep more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, but too much sleep can also be linked to higher death rates.
They found those who had cut their sleeping from seven hours to five hours or less, faced a 1.7 fold increased risk of death from all causes, and twice the increased risk of death from a cardiovascular problem in particular.
To quote Dr Cappuccio and his co-author Dr Michelle Miller :
Consistently sleeping less could have a detrimental effect on your health but apparently too much sleep may be as bad for us as too little.
A lack of sleep more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, but too much sleep can also be linked to higher death rates.
They found those who had cut their sleeping from seven hours to five hours or less, faced a 1.7 fold increased risk of death from all causes, and twice the increased risk of death from a cardiovascular problem in particular.
To quote Dr Cappuccio and his co-author Dr Michelle Miller :
There is an expectation in today's society to fit more into our lives. The whole work/life balance struggle is causing too many of us to trade in precious sleeping time to ensure we complete all the jobs we believe are expected of us.I always thought that 8 hours of sleep was optimal, but apparently not so...
Chronic short sleep produces hormones and chemicals in the body which increase the risk of developing heart disease and strokes, and other conditions like high blood pressure and cholesterol, diabetes and obesity.
Sleep represents the daily process of physiological restitution and recovery, and lack of sleep has far-reaching effects.
Wednesday, August 04, 2010
Lack of Sleep Can Even Affect How You See Colors
According to a study carried out at the University of Houston in Texas, a lack of sleep can affect how you see colors.
The study involved five people who viewed a full-field, homogenous stimulus of either slightly reddish or greenish hue. The observers had to judge whether the stimulus was greener or redder than their internal perception of neutral gray. Across trials the hue was varied. One pair of monocular tests was performed just before participants went to sleep, and testing was repeated after participants slept for an average of 7.7 hours.
Lack of sleep can make you see the color gray as having a slightly but significantly greenish tint. Overnight sleep restored perception to achromatic equilibrium so that gray was perceived as gray.
According to the authors and principal investigator Bhavin Sheth, scientists had not previously investigated how sleep might affect the way we view the world around us. "Our findings suggest that wakefulness causes color classification to drift away from neutrality, and sleep restores color classification to neutral." In other words, a lack of sleep makes you see neutral colors abnormally and when you are sleeping well again, this color perception is restored to normal.
The study involved five people who viewed a full-field, homogenous stimulus of either slightly reddish or greenish hue. The observers had to judge whether the stimulus was greener or redder than their internal perception of neutral gray. Across trials the hue was varied. One pair of monocular tests was performed just before participants went to sleep, and testing was repeated after participants slept for an average of 7.7 hours.
Lack of sleep can make you see the color gray as having a slightly but significantly greenish tint. Overnight sleep restored perception to achromatic equilibrium so that gray was perceived as gray.
According to the authors and principal investigator Bhavin Sheth, scientists had not previously investigated how sleep might affect the way we view the world around us. "Our findings suggest that wakefulness causes color classification to drift away from neutrality, and sleep restores color classification to neutral." In other words, a lack of sleep makes you see neutral colors abnormally and when you are sleeping well again, this color perception is restored to normal.
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