Sleep loss affects brain function in numerous ways, including disrupting both working and long-term memory, attention, and decision making. While the last two decades have provided new insights into how sleep loss affects neural activity, gene expression and protein translation, a complete understanding of the cell biological effects of sleep deprivation (SD) in the brain is still lacking.
Wang et al. recently published an article in the Journal of Sleep that looks to discuss recent findings demonstrating that acute or chronic sleep loss can alter the structures of the brain at a cellular level in the neuronal somata, which is the main part of a neuron. There where changes noted in sleep deprived individual’s cells across various organelles including the mitochondria, nucleus, and Golgi apparatus.
The authors discuss how, taken together, the available data suggests that sleep loss (particularly chronic sleep loss) disrupts such fundamental cellular processes as transcription, translation, intracellular transport, and metabolism. These structural changes may reflect underlying cell biological changes within the brain and provide new insights into how sleep loss affects the function of neurons at the cellular level.
A better understanding of these effects will have broad implications for understanding the biological importance of sleep, and the relationship of sleep loss to neuropathology.
To access the original, you can find it here:
https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsac047
Article reference:
Lijing Wang, Sara J Aton, Perspective – ultrastructural analyses reflect the effects of sleep and sleep loss on neuronal cell biology, Sleep, Volume 45, Issue 5, May 2022, zsac047, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsac047
