Your brain needs sleep
Two new studies drive home the potential importance of getting enough sleep if you want to keep your brain healthy.
One from the University of Pennsylvania tied disrupted sleep - the equivalent of shift work - to the death of brain cells that are important for mood, thinking, attention span and responding to stressful situations. One from Temple University found that two months of inadequate sleep led to impaired learning and memory as well as physical changes in the brain consistent with Alzheimer's disease.
Both were done in mice, so it's too soon to know if humans respond similarly. But they raise disturbing questions about the toll our 24-hour society may be taking on our brains.
"Until we know more, maybe we better think a little bit more about our sleep," said Sigrid Veasey, an associate professor in Penn's Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology. Her study found that sleep-deprived mice had problems even when they had a chance to make up some of the sleep they'd lost.
Domenico Pratico, Ph.D., the Temple Alzheimer's researcher who studied mice modified to develop the memory-robbing disease, agreed that people would be wise to think of getting six to eight hours of sleep a night as being as important to health as a good diet and vigorous exercise.
Sleep problems have long been linked to Alzheimer's, but doctors don't know whether they are a cause or symptom of the disease.
Dr. Pratico's eight-week study used mice that develop Alzheimer's at 14 to 15 months old. When they were 6 months old, he exposed some of them to a normal schedule of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness. Others got 20 hours of light and four hours of darkness.
After the trial, the sleep-deprived mice did 40 to 50 percent worse on tests of learning and memory than the mice that had been on a normal schedule.
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