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These “elite sleepers” show psychological resilience and resistance to neurodegenerative conditions, information that can be used to design therapies to combat neurological diseases.
“There is a dogma regarding sleep that says we all need eight hours of sleep, but our work confirms that the amount of sleep that people need differs according to genetics,” says the neurologist Louis Ptacekone of the lead authors of the study appearing in “iScience.”
Think of it as analogous to the height; There is no perfect amount of height, everyone is different. We have shown that the case is similar for sleep », she adds.
For more than a decade, Ptacek and co-senior author Ying-Hui Fu of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neuroscience have been studying people who are naturally short sleepers — four to six hours of sleep a night.
Their research has shown that it runs in families, and so far they have identified five genes that play a role in enabling this efficient sleep. But there are still many more genes to be found, the researchers acknowledge.
This study tested the hypothesis that so-called ‘elite sleep’ may be a shield against neurodegenerative diseases.
His ideas stand in contrast to current thinking that, for many people, lack of sleep can accelerate neurodegeneration.
The difference, Fu said, is that in this case, the brain performs its sleep tasks in less time. In other words, less time spent sleeping efficiently may not equate to sleep deprivation.
The team looked at mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease and bred mice that had both the short sleeper gene and genes that predisposed them to the disease. Thus they discovered that their brains developed much less of the characteristic symptoms associated with dementia. To confirm their findings, they repeated the experiment using mice with a different short sleep gene and another dementia gene, and the results were similar.
Fu and Ptacek believe that similar investigations of other brain conditions would show that efficient sleep genes confer comparable protections. improving people’s sleep could slow disease progression across a spectrum of conditions.
“Sleep problems are common in all brain diseases,” they say, “this makes sense because the sleep is a complex activity. Many parts of your brain have to work together for you to fall asleep and wake up. When these parts of the brain are damaged, it’s harder to sleep or get quality sleep.”
Understanding the biological underpinnings of sleep regulation could identify drugs that help prevent sleep disorder problems, they conclude.
In addition, improving sleep in healthy people can maintain well-being and improve the quality of time that each one has. Discovering the many genes involved is a long process that they liken to putting together a thousand-piece puzzle.
“Each mutation we find is another piece,” says Ptacek. Right now we’re working on the edges and the corners, to get to that place where it’s easier to put the pieces together and where the image really starts to emerge.”
Despite the long road ahead, some of the few genes they have identified are already promising. At least one of them can be the object of existing drugs that could be reused. Their hope is that, in the next decade, they will have helped to facilitate new treatments that allow people with brain disorders to rest better at night.
“This work opens the door to a new understanding of how to delay and possibly prevent many diseases,” he concludes. Fu.- Our goal really is to help everyone live healthier and longer through optimal sleep.
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