Sleep

Wisconsin researchers identify sleep gene

Zeroing in on the core cellular mechanisms of sleep, researchers at University of Wisconsin Medical School have identified for the first time a single gene mutation that has a powerful effect on the amount of time fruit flies sleep. In its normal state, the Drosophila (fruit fly) gene, called Shaker, produces an ion channel that controls the flow of potassium into cells, a process that cr...

Brain-mapping technique aids understanding of sleep, wakefulness

The power of a new technique to map connections among nerve cells in the brain has a UT Southwestern Medical Center scientist dreaming of solving the mysteries of sleep. By tracking which nerve cells in the mouse brain stimulate others, researchers in Japan and at UT Southwestern found that a type of neuron responsible for keeping animals awake receives inhibitory signals from neurons act...

Newly discovered protein an important tool for sleeping sickness research

Sixty million people in 36 countries of sub-Saharan Africa are threatened daily by a deadly parasitic disease known as African sleeping sickness. The disease is caused by organisms called trypanosomes, which are spread by the tsetse fly. African sleeping sickness affects approximately 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa, a quarter of whom will die this year. Because the trypanosome has an except...

Researchers Identify Cause of Early Bird Sleep Disorder

A few rare people who consistently nod off early, then wake up wide-eyed much before dawn, can blame a newly-found mutant gene for their sleep troubles, Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers announced today. This odd "time-shift" trait -- called familial advanced sleep phase syndrome (FASPS) -- was studied in one affected family by neurologist Louis J. Ptacek, a Howard Hughes Medical...

Sleeping Sickness Epidemic Spreading in Uganda

A drug first used to reduce the risk of stomach ulcers in people taking certain types of painkillers offers an alternative to surgery after miscarriage, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health and other research institutions. The study appears in the August 18, 2005, New England Journal of Med...

Compound might defeat African sleeping sickness, clinical trial beginning this month

One of the most devastating diseases in sub-Saharan Africa almost disappeared in the late 1950s. That disease, African sleeping sickness, or trypanosomiasis, largely succumbed to heroic public health efforts -- including relocating entire villages. But in the past several decades, because of post-colonial turmoil, the catastrophic illness has come back to ravage parts of Angola, the Democratic Re...

Deep sleep short-circuits brain's grid of connectivity

In the human brain, cells talk to one another through the routine exchange of electrical signals. But when people fall into a deep sleep, the higher regions of the brain - regions that during waking hours are a bustling grid of neural dialogue - apparently lose their ability to communicate effectively, causing consciousness to fade. Writing today (Sept. 30) in the journal Science, a team o...

Sleeping beauty plays a significant role in identifying cancer genes

Researchers at the University of Minnesota Cancer Center and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, have discovered a new method that could accelerate the way cancer-causing genes are found and could lead to a more accurate identification of the genes, according to two studies in the July 14, 2005, issue of Nature. The gene identification method was...

Flies on speed offer insight into the roles of dopamine in sleep and arousal

Methamphetamine, the drug of choice for long-distance truckers and college students pulling all-nighters, appears to do a similar trick for fruit flies, too. This finding is one of several in a new study that demonstrates a critical role for the neurotransmitter dopamine in the modulation of sleep, wake, and arousal states. The work is reported by Dr. Ralph Greenspan and colleagues at The...

Nighttime Dying Linked To Sleep Apnea From Brain Cell Loss

UCLA biochemists reveal the first structural details of a family of mysterious objects called microcompartments that seem to be present in a variety of bacteria. The discovery was published Aug. 5 in the journal Science. "This is the first look at how microcompartments are built, and what the pieces look like," said Todd O. Yeates, UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and a member...

Sleeping sickness parasite shows how cells divide their insides

Researchers at Yale have brought to light a mechanism that regulates the way an internal organelle, the Golgi apparatus, duplicates as cells prepare to divide, according to a report in Science Express. ,...

Asleep in the deep: Model helps assess ocean-injection strategy for combating greenhouse effect

In searching for ways to counteract the greenhouse effect, some scientists have proposed capturing the culprit---carbon dioxide---as it is emitted from power plants, then liquefying the gas and injecting it into the ocean. But there are pitfalls in that plan. The carbon dioxide can rise toward the surface, turn into gas bubbles and vent to the atmosphere, defeating the purpose of the whol...

Waking a sleeping virus

A detailed structural picture of a molecule that plays a key role in activating the Epstein Barr Virus in human cells has now been obtained by researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and the Institut de Virologie Moléculaire et Structurale (IVMS), associated with the Université Jos...

Morning grogginess more debilitating than sleep deprivation, according to CU-Boulder study

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study shows that people who awaken after eight hours of sound sleep have more impaired thinking and memory skills than they do after being deprived of sleep for more than 24 hours. The study showed test subjects had diminished short-term memory, counting skills and cognitive abilities during the groggy period upon awakening known as sleep inertia, sa...

Losing sleep undoes the rejuvenating effects new learning has on the brain

As the pace of life quickens and it becomes harder to balance home and work, many people meet their obligations by getting less sleep. But sleep deprivation impairs spatial learning -- including remembering how to get to a new destination. And now scientists are beginning to understand how that happens: Learning spatial tasks increases the production of new cells in an area of the brain in...

A large step forward in the fight against African sleeping sickness

Each year, over 300,000 people die of African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis). Researchers from the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) connected to the Free University of Brussels are making strides in the battle against this disease. They have coupled the human protein ApoL-1 with a nanobody in order to very specifically eliminate the infection caused by the p...

Sleep deprivation doubles risks of obesity in both children and adults

Research by Warwick Medical School at the University of Warwick has found that sleep deprivation is associated with an almost a two-fold increased risk of being obese for both children and adults. Early results of a study by Professor Francesco Cappuccio of the University of Warwick's Warwick Medical School were presented to the International AC21 Research Festival hosted this month by th...

Serotonin, acting in a specific brain region, promotes sleep in fruit flies

Researchers have found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, known to affect many behaviors, also appears to promote lasting, quality sleep in an animal model for understanding how sleep is regulated. While central to the lives of most animals, the proper regulation sleep remains a largely enigmatic process. The findings are reported by Quan Yuan, William Joiner, and Amita Sehgal at the Un...

Resistance and genetic sensitivity to sleeping sickness

Human African trypanosomiasis, more commonly called sleeping sickness, is induced by a parasite, the trypanosome, transmitted to humans by the bite of an insect, the glossinid tse-tse fly. There has been a resurgence of this disease over the past 20 years in Sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization (WHO) in a 1998 report estimated the number of people infected to be about 300 000. Awaren...

First biomarker for human sleepiness identified in fruit flies

Scientists have identified the first biochemical marker linked to sleep loss, an enzyme in saliva known as amylase, which increases in activity when sleep deprivation is prolonged. Researchers hope to make amylase the first of a panel of biomarkers that will aid diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders and may one day help assess the risk of falling asleep at the wheel of a car or in oth...

New study suggests promising drug combinations for sleeping sickness

Results from a clinical trial evaluating new drug combinations for sleeping sickness, carried out by the international humanitarian medical aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), and its research arm, Epicentre, have now been published in the journal PLoS Clinical Trials. African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness affects many tens of thousands of people each year in sub-Sahara...

Learning during sleep?

If I can't remember this morning where I put my car keys last night, it's due to my memory failing me again. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg have been investigating how memories might be consolidated. Their new study offers the hitherto strongest proof that new information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebra...

Negative effects of caffeine are stronger on daytime sleep than on nocturnal sleep

A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded that people drinking coffee to get through a night shift or a night of studying will strongly hurt their recovery sleep the next day. The study published in the current issue of Neuropsychopharmacology was conducted by Dr. Julie Carrier from the Department of Psychology at the Université de Montréal. Dr. Carrier runs the Chronobiology Labora...

Sleep enforces the temporal sequence in memory

We have usually quite strong memories of past events like an exciting holiday or a jolly birthday party. However it is not clear how the brain keeps track of the temporal sequence in such memories: did Paul spill a glass of wine before or after Mary left the party? Previous findings from a research group headed by Jan Born at the University of Lübeck have confirmed the widely held view th...

Sleep disturbances affect classroom performance

As a night of bad sleep can have an adverse effect on an adult’s performance at work the next day, an insufficient amount of rest can also have a negative impact on how well middle or high school students perform in the classroom. A study published in the February 15th issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine (JCSM) finds that adolescents who experience sleep disturbances are more likely...

Children who sleep more weigh less

Children who sleep more tend to weigh less than children who sleep less, and they are less likely than their counterparts to be overweight five years later. That’s one of the major findings of a new study published in the January/February 2007 issue of the journal Child Development. Conducted by researchers at Northwestern University, the study looked at 2,281 children from a nationally re...

Individual differences in a clock gene predict decline of performance during sleep deprivation

People are known to differ markedly in their response to sleep deprivation, but the biological underpinnings of these differences have remained difficult to identify. Researchers have now found that a genetic difference in a so-called clock gene, PERIOD3, makes some people particularly sensitive to the effects of sleep deprivation. The findings, reported by Antoine Viola, Derk-Jan Dijk, and colle...

To sleep, perchance to dream: New insight into melatonin production

In the April 1 issue of G&D, a Korean research team led by Dr. Kyong-Tai Kim (Pohang University) describes how melatonin production is coordinated with the body's natural sleep/wake cycles. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain, which helps to regulate our bodies' circadian rhythm (the roughly-24-hour cycle around which basic physiological processes proceed)....

Sleep quantity affects morning testosterone levels in older men

The testosterone levels of healthy men decline as they get older. As sleep quality and quantity typically decrease with age, objectively measured differences in the amount of sleep a healthy older man gets can affect his level of testosterone in the morning, according to a study published in the April 1st issue of the journal SLEEP. The study, conducted by Plamen Penev, MD, PhD, of the Un...

Sleepless for science: Flies show link between sleep, immune system in Stanford study

Go a few nights without enough sleep and you're more likely to get sick, but scientists have no real explanation for how sleep is related to the immune system. Now, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine are finding that fruit flies can point to the answers. What they have learned thus far is that illness and sleep disruption may be a two-way street: sick flies can't sle...

Chronic fatigue syndrome impairs a person's slow wave activity during sleep

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has been associated with altered amounts of slow wave sleep, which could reflect reduced electroencephalograph (EEG) activity and impaired sleep regulation. A study published in the May 1st issue of the journal SLEEP finds that CFS is also associated with a blunted slow wave activity (SWA) response to sleep challenge, suggesting an impairment of the basic sleep dri...

College students who pull 'all-nighters' and get no sleep more likely to have a lower GPA

"Sleep...

Longer treatment benefits sleep apnea patients

Adults with obstructive sleep apnea benefit significantly from longer nightly use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), a device to improve breathing during sleep, according to a new study supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health. This is the first study to identify the nightly duration of CPAP use needed to g...