How do we inspire the brain to make for sleep loss?
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Researchers discovered neurons in rats that can help their brain track and get from Debt to sleep. If a similar passage exists people, can improve treatments for sleeping disorders and other conditions marked by sleep damage, such as Alzheimer’s pain.
All of us familiar with sleep debt, or gap between How much sleep do you need and what you get. But so far, it is unclear how the brain tracks the loss of sleep – or forcing us to make this difference.
Mark Wu At Johns Hopkins University in Maryland and his associated brain maps in the mice involved in sleep by injecting a tracer in 11-known asleep. The tracer, traveling from neurons receiving signals to send them, revealed 22 regions with at least four places highlighting sleep.
Researchers focus on a subset of 11 previously unrecognized regions. Using a technique called chemogenetics, they give me special drugs that move specific parts of their brain. They divided rats into 11 groups of three to four individuals, activating different areas of each group.
A region called Thamic Nucleus Reenens seems to be key. If neurons in this area are stimulated, mice have experienced the greatest increase in an unaccessed eye movement (rep) sleep – about twice the amount that is not motivated. However, many hours for animals to fall asleep after encouraging, when they seem to be prepared for rest.
“If you go to bed, you may have your teeth, you wash your face, you wash your pillows or arranged your blanket,” says Wu. The mice have something similar. “They were different from their face, they cleaned their whispers in their whispers and then they took their nest,” he said. It suggests that these neurons are not an on-and-off switch for sleep – however, they impose sleep.
Another test also supports this idea. Of six mice deprived of sleep, deactivating thamic nucleus requeus brain brain cells make less rodents sleepy – they are more active and spent less time to nest rather than to control rats. They also got 10 percent less non-sleep, generally.
Other experiments show that these neuronts are active activated during sleep deprivation and quietly after starting to sleep.
Join, the findings suggest that this region of the brain drives sleep and prompts restoring restoration after loss of sleep, says Wu. The development of therapists who target these neurons can lead to new treatments for hypersomnia – a sore sleeping disordered after restrooms like situations like people without sleep.
However, it is not clear if the same brain circuit exists people, as William Garden In Stanford University in California. We also don’t know if it has a role in long sleep deprivation. “They focus on more than easy effects of sleep deprivation, which may not model people in years and years of sleepless nights,” he said.
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