This is interesting:
Study: Sleep linked to brain cell creation:
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science research on rats found that the hippocampus portion of the brain was directly affected by a lack of sleep for a long period, the BBC reported.
By depriving rats of sleep for 72 hours, the researchers found that those animals consequently had increased amounts of the stress hormone corticosterone, and produced significantly fewer new brain cells in the hippocampus.
When the rats' sleep patterns were returned to normal a week later, their levels of nerve-cell production remained hindered for two weeks.
The lack of production appeared to prompt the brain to increase its efforts to maintain an appropriate balance.
British sleep expert Dr. Neil Stanley called the finding "interesting," but said more study on sleep depravation might be useful.
"It would be interesting to see if partial sleep deprivation -- getting a little bit less sleep every night than you need -- had the same effect," he told the BBC.
But does that have anything to do with memory?
- Log in to post comments
Surely there must be some papers on behavioural experiments on sleep depriaton and memory
Oh, of course, tons of it and I have written about several of them in the past - I was just asking the readers to connect not just A and B (sleep and memory) and A and C (this paper, i.e., sleep and hippocampus cell growth), but also B and C (hippocampus and memory, something placed into question by a very recent paper commented on elsewhere on Scienceblogs last week).
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v4/n6/full/nn0601_567.html shows other sleep-related effects on glucocorticoids. I wonder if chronic sleep deprivation can lead to the same kind of cognitive deficits observed in that study.