Lost Sleep Leads to Lost Neurons

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.