sleep cycle
Reset Your Body Clock with a Camping Trip
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit: Kenneth P Wright, University of Colorado at Boulder
School’s starting soon, and a lot of kids (and some adults) who were sleeping late this summer are struggling to reset their sleep cycles. All summer, those biological clocks have been getting pushed back. Artificial light allows us to work and play into the wee hours, interfering with the natural light-dark cycle that, over most of human history, began at sunrise and ended just after sunset.
But there’s a price to be paid for this modern shifting of biological clocks: research shows that long term indulgence in these late sleep schedules leads to unwanted weight gain and obesity, mood problems, substance abuse, and, of course, morning sleepiness. Light and sleep are critical to good health—and that’s one reason NIH funded a team at the University of Colorado Boulder to investigate the impact of natural light on our modern sleep patterns [1].
Tick Tock, Your Brain is Keeping Time
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
The neurons in the SCN are coupled oscillators, like these metronomes on a moveable table that has enough wiggle that each metronome’s motion affects the others’. Like the metronomes the neurons keep time individually and, because the VIP network couples them, they synchronize their beats.Video by the Ikeguchi Laboratory, in the graduate school of science and engineering at Saitama University in Japan. |
Did you know you have a biological clock in your brain that drives your sleep patterns and metabolism?
The clock is mostly in a brain region called the suprachiasmatic nucleus—a collection of about 20,000 brain cells, or neurons. Each one of these neurons can keep time, just like a metronome sitting on a piano. Together, these 20,000 biological clocks are kept perfectly synchronized, and they are accurate to about a few minutes within a 1440-minute day. A brain signaling chemical called VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) plays an important role in keeping all of the neurons ticking in unrelenting lock step. But VIP doesn’t work alone.
Sleep Gene Linked to Migraines
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
“Migraine.” This oil painting, by Dr. Emily Bates, was created while she was collecting data for this publication. As a migraine sufferer, this painting describes how migraines feel to her.
Credit: Emily Bates
Migraines—pounding headaches sometimes preceded by a visual “aura,” and often coupled with vomiting, nausea, distorted vision, and hypersensitivity to sound and touch—can be highly debilitating if recurrent and prolonged. They affect millions of Americans and an estimated 10–20 percent of the global population. Yet what predisposes individuals to them is somewhat of a mystery. Though there are certainly environmental triggers, the tendency for migraines to run in families suggests that there’s likely an inherited component. Recently, a team of NIH-funded researchers, one of whom regularly suffered from migraines herself, found a gene that plays a part.
