A new study published in the magazine Neuroscience once again points out the importance of having a good nights sleep. For Dr. Dr. Chiara Cirelli and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, sleep helps repair certain brain cells. And not just any: the cells that produce myelin, the substance that isolates and protects our nervous system.
To reach this conclusion, Dr Cirelli and his team studied the brains of mice while they were sleeping and they found that rodents produced twice as much myelin when they were asleep and plunged into a phase of deep sleep, associated with to dreams. Conversely, the genes involved in cell degeneration were all activated when the researchers prevented the mice from sleeping. In other words, brain cells and our nervous system do not function normally when we are sleep deprived. A conclusion which joins that of a recent Californian study which shows that insomniacs have poorer brains than the others.
This discovery is particularly important because it opens up new perspectives on the treatment of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune neurological disease of the central nervous system.
The sleeping troubles today affect 20% of the population of industrialized countries. In France, one in three people say they suffer from a sleep disorder and 15% say they regularly encounter problems insomnia.
