Japanese researchers have succeeded in developing a sleeping pill on mice that allows the brain to remain alert in the event of danger during sleep.
Everyone knows that during insomnia, sometimes the only solution is to take a sleeping pill. However, if it puts us to sleep, it happens that it knocks us out to the point that we won’t wake up if our building catches fire, which can be quite dangerous, we will agree. This is why Japanese researchers developed on mice, DORA-22, a sleeping pill capable of putting us to sleep without affecting our sensory abilities in the event of a threat. The results of this research were published this week in the journal in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
When we naturally sleep, the brain continues to process sensory information, waking us up when it detects a threat. However, the most common sleeping pills, which belong to the benzodiazepine family, tend to suppress this cerebral faculty. “Benzodiazepines stimulate the widespread brain receptor GABA-A, which makes us sleepy, but also suppresses off-target brain areas, including the ‘gatekeeper’ that determines which sensory inputs to process,” says Tomoyuki Kuwaki, a professor at the Kagoshima University and lead author of the study. Moreover, these sleeping pills are so heavy that in the morning we are most often gassed and unable to drive.
To combat this hangover effect, researchers have spent the past decade developing a new family of sleeping pills called dual orexin receptor antagonists (DORAs) that far more effectively target sleep-related pathways in the body. brain than a conventional sleeping pill.
Very promising results
Kuwaki and his colleagues therefore had the idea of using this new family of sleeping pills to develop a pill that could allow the brain to remain alert in the event of danger during sleep. They created DORA-22 which they tested on mice divided into three groups. They administered their sleeping pill to the first group, gave Triazolam, a classic benzodiazepine pill, to the second and a placebo to the third. The first two groups fell asleep just as quickly, their extended sleep time was 30-40% compared to the last.
Then, one to four hours later, the sleeping mice were confronted with different stimuli: the smell of a fox, a high-pitched noise, or a shaking of their cage similar to an earthquake (not a coincidence when you know how prone Japan is to earthquakes). “As expected, the response to these threats was greatly delayed by Triazolam treatment, but not in mice that had taken DORA-22,” says Professor Kuwaki.
Even better, the sleep-inducing effects of DORA-22 remained after the sudden awakening. “Although the mice on DORA-22 woke up quickly when a threat approached, they went back to sleep as quickly as those on Triazolam and much faster than those on placebo”, develops the researcher. And to conclude: “If it remains to be seen whether DORA has the same properties on humans, our study has given promising results”.
Conventional sleeping pills have deleterious effects on memory
In the meantime, the consumption of benzodiazepines continues to increase in France. Currently, 10 million French people consume sleeping pills from this family. However, in addition to the hangover aspect pointed out above and the inability to wake up in case of danger when taking them, these pills would also have many deleterious effects on the body.
In November, the magazine 60 Million consumers alerted in particular on “suicidal desires and risks of hetero-aggressiveness, namely risks of aggressiveness towards others” among consumers of Tilnox, Imovane and Zolpidem. Moreover, according to a study published in 2017 in the journal Science, sleeping pills would disrupt brain plasticity allowing the formation of our memories during sleep. Two years earlier, Inserm researchers had already associated long half-life benzodiazepines (which remain in the body longer) with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
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