I slept like crap in the hospital. Does taking sleeping pills even count as sleeping? In mice however.
http://www.biosciencetechnology.com/news/2014/03/lost-sleep-leads-lost-neurons?
Using a mouse model of chronic sleep loss, Sigrid Veasey, MD ,
associate professor of Medicine and a member of the Center for Sleep and
Circadian Neurobiology at the Perelman School of Medicine and
collaborators from Peking University, have determined that extended
wakefulness is linked to injury to, and loss of, neurons that are
essential for alertness and optimal cognition, the locus coeruleus (LC)
neurons.
"In general, we’ve always assumed full recovery of cognition
following short- and long-term sleep loss," Veasey says. "But some of
the research in humans has shown that attention span and several other
aspects of cognition may not normalize even with three days of recovery
sleep, raising the question of lasting injury in the brain. We wanted to
figure out exactly whether chronic sleep loss injures neurons, whether
the injury is reversible, and which neurons are involved."
Mice were examined following periods of normal rest, short
wakefulness, or extended wakefulness, modeling a shift worker's typical
sleep pattern. The Veasey lab found that in response to short-term sleep
loss, LC neurons upregulate the sirtuin type 3 (SirT3) protein, which
is important for mitochondrial energy production and redox responses,
and protect the neurons from metabolic injury. SirT3 is essential across
short-term sleep loss to maintain metabolic homeostasis, but in
extended wakefulness, the SirT3 response is missing. After several days
of shift worker sleep patterns, LC neurons in the mice began to display
reduced SirT3, increased cell death, and the mice lost 25 percent of
these neurons.
Lots more at link, ask your doctor about your losing neurons due to sleep irregularities.
In the hospital for rest? LOL! They wake you every couple of hours for something or other.
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