The sleep Chronic insufficiency can negatively affect the immune cells, which in turn can lead to inflammatory disorders and cardiovascular disease, according to a new study from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Specific, constantly losing an hour and a half of sleep each night potentially increases the risk.
The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, is the first to show that sleep alters the DNA structure within immune stem cells that produce white blood cells, also known as immune cells, and this may have a life-threatening impact. long duration and contribute to the development of inflammatory diseases.
Immune cells fight infection, but if the number of these cells gets too high, they overreact and cause infection. inflammation. The study is also the first to show that catching up on sleep doesn’t reverse the effects of losing it.
“This study begins to identify the biological mechanisms that link sleep and long-term immune health. It shows that in humans and mice, sleep disruption has a profound influence on the programming of immune cells and the speed of their production, causing them to lose their protective effects and actually make infections worse, and these changes are durable. This is important because it is another key observation that sleep reduces inflammation and, conversely, that sleep disruption increases inflammation,” says Dr. Filip Swirski, director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai and lead author of the study. »This work emphasizes the importance of adults sleeping seven to eight hours a day to help prevent inflammation and disease, especially for those with underlying medical conditions.”
A team of researchers looked at 14 healthy adults who normally get eight hours of sleep a night. First, the researchers monitored them sleeping for at least eight hours each night for six weeks. They drew his blood and analyzed his immune cells. The same group of adults then reduced their sleep time by 90 minutes every night for six weeks, and their blood and immune cells were retested. At the end of the study, the researchers compared blood and cell samples from full night’s sleep and periods of restricted sleep. All participants had significant changes in your immune cells (also known as hematopoietic cells) due to lack of sleep: there were more and the structure of the DNA was altered.
The researchers also looked at sleep in mouse models. Groups of mice were either allowed to sleep undisturbed or had fragmented sleep, waking up every night for 16 weeks. The sleep-fragmented mice then went through uninterrupted sleep recovery for ten weeks. The researchers took immune stem cells and immune cells from mice during these undisturbed, fragmented, and recovery phases of sleep, analyzed them, and compared them at the end of the experiment.
The results in mice were consistent with the results in humans. They showed that all mice with broken sleep had significant changes in their immune stem cells, producing increased numbers of immune cells, and also showed evidence of rewiring and reprogramming. A notable finding from the group of mice was that even after recovery from sleep, the immune stem cells retained this wiring structure and continued to produce additional white blood cells, making the rodents susceptible to inflammation and disease.
“Our findings suggest that sleep catch-up cannot completely reverse the effects of poor-quality sleep. We can detect a molecular fingerprint of insufficient sleep in immune stem cells, even after weeks of catch-up sleep. This molecular imprinting can cause cells to respond inappropriately, leading to inflammation and disease,” said Cameron McAlpine, Ph.D., assistant professor of medicine (cardiology) at Icahn Mount Sinai and co-principal investigator.
“It was surprising to find that not all groups of stem cells responded to sleep deprivation in the same way. There were some groups of stem cells that proliferated and grew in number, while other groups got smaller. This reduction in the overall diversity and aging of the immune stem cell population is an important contributor to inflammatory and cardiovascular diseases,” he concludes.