14 DAY TRIAL // Though scientists still have no clue why we need to sleep, if we don't, there are always consequences. One of the most severe is the fact that our memory is left in tatters and that we lose our ability to concentrate on the tasks at hand throughout the next day. Now, researchers hope to counteract some of these effects with the help of a new drug that they say has already shown promising results in mice.
“One of the main problems is that sleep deprivation does a lot of things to the brain, and it's easy to get caught in a mish-mash of different effects,” expert Christopher Vecsey, from the Brandeis University in Massachusetts, explains. He adds that, while everyone is prone to the influence of tiredness, no one really knows what the molecular mechanism behind this association is.
In the new research, the effects of sleep deprivation on a brain area known as the hippocampus got a thorough review. Expert Ted Abel, from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, led the team of scientists that included Vecsey. The hippocampus has long been proven to play a crucial role in learning and memory, and the researchers thought that it would make a good starting point for the new investigation, Nature News reports.
The team analyzed the levels and concentrations of several molecules in the hippocampus, in mouse models that had been deprived of sleep for more than five hours. The analysis results showed that the animals exhibited heightened levels of the PDE4 enzyme in this brain region when prevented from falling asleep. The researchers also discovered that PDE4 acted on a cascade of molecular reactions that prevented long-term memories from being formed.
In order to test if their theory was correct, the scientists gave the mice a drug that inhibited PDE4, and then tested to see if the rodents remembered a fear stimulus. “When we treated [mice] with the drug we found that the memory deficits that they normally would have had with sleep deprivation were prevented,” Vecsey reveals. The team published its results in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Nature.