Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain

What will our researchers say about this?
Is incomplete cleaning causing our brain fog?
Do sleeping pills disrupt that cleaning process? Most survivors in my hospital got sleeping pills to ensure that we would get to sleep. Which was bizarre since during the day I could fall asleep in five minutes any time I stopped moving.
The BBC report here;

Sleep 'cleans' the brain of toxins

Abstract here;

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373

1. Lulu Xie¹,*,
2. Hongyi Kang¹,*,
3. Qiwu Xu¹,
4. Michael J. Chen¹,
5. Yonghong Liao¹,
6. Meenakshisundaram Thiyagarajan¹,
7. John O’Donnell¹,
8. Daniel J. Christensen¹,
9. Charles Nicholson²,
10. Jeffrey J. Iliff¹,
11. Takahiro Takano¹,
12. Rashid Deane¹,
13. Maiken Nedergaard¹,†

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹Division of Glial Disease and Therapeutics, Center for Translational Neuromedicine, Department of Neurosurgery, University of Rochester Medical Center, Rochester, NY 14642, USA.
2. ²Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, Langone Medical Center, New York University, New York, NY 10016, USA.

1. ↵†Corresponding author. E-mail: nedergaard@urmc.rochester.edu

1. ↵* These authors contributed equally to this work.

• Abstract
• Editor's Summary

The conservation of sleep across all animal species suggests that sleep serves a vital function. We here report that sleep has a critical function in ensuring metabolic homeostasis. Using real-time assessments of tetramethylammonium diffusion and two-photon imaging in live mice, we show that natural sleep or anesthesia are associated with a 60% increase in the interstitial space, resulting in a striking increase in convective exchange of cerebrospinal fluid with interstitial fluid. In turn, convective fluxes of interstitial fluid increased the rate of β-amyloid clearance during sleep. Thus, the restorative function of sleep may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system.