You may have heard that one should sleep for eight hours, but according to studies, this is dependent on a person’s genetics. When it comes to sleep, quantity isn’t as important as quality. People with Familial Natural Short Sleep (FNSS) prefer to sleep four to six hours each night and may still function normally.
These “elite sleepers,” according to researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, display psychological resilience and resistance to neurodegenerative disorders, which might hint to a new means of preventing neurological illness.
It simply implies that the brain completes its sleep-related functions in less time. In other words, according to Ying-Hui Fu of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, less time spent sleeping efficiently does not always imply a lack of sleep.
The researchers have discovered that it runs in families and have thus far identified five genes that play a role in facilitating this efficient sleep across the genome.
“There’s a dogma in the profession that everyone requires eight hours of sleep,” said Institute neurologist Louis Ptacek. “However, our work to date demonstrates that the quantity of sleep people needs varied dependent on genetics.”
Because Alzheimer’s disease is so common, the researchers opted to look at mice models of the disease in their study, which was published in the journal iScience.
They raised mice with both short-sleep genes and genes that predispose them to Alzheimer’s disease, and discovered that their brains formed far less of the dementia-associated aggregates. They repeated the experiment with mice carrying a different short-sleep gene and a different dementia gene, and got identical results.
Similar studies of other brain disorders, the researchers believe, would demonstrate that the efficient-sleep genes give similar safeguards. They believe that increasing people’s sleep might slow the course of disease across a wide range of disorders.
“Sleep issues are frequent in all brain illnesses,” Ptacek explained. “Sleep is a complicated process, so this makes sense. For you to fall asleep and wake up, several regions of your brain must operate together. It is more difficult to sleep or have good sleep when various areas of the brain are impaired.”
Understanding the molecular basis of sleep regulation may lead to the development of medications that can help people avoid sleep issues. Furthermore, the experts believe that enhancing sleep in healthy adults can help to maintain wellbeing and increase the quality of time we all have.
