NEW YORK: Scientists have discovered that switching on one area of the brain chemically can trigger a deep sleep. The new study, which explored how sedatives work in the brain’s neural pathways, could lead to better remedies for insomnia and more effective anaesthetic drugs.
Scientists from Imperial College London found that certain types of sedative drugs work by ‘switching on’ neurons in a particular area of the brain, called the preoptic hypothalamus.
Their work, in mice, showed that it is these neurons that are responsible for shutting down the areas of the brain that are inactive during deep sleep. Following a period of sleep deprivation, the brain triggers a process that leads to a deep recovery sleep.
The researchers found that the process that is triggered by the sedatives is very similar. In mice, when the researchers used a chemical to activate only specific neurons in the preoptic hypothalamus, this produced a recovery sleep in the animals.
The new research is important because although scientists understand how sedatives bind to certain receptors to cause their desired effects, it had previously been assumed that they had a general effect throughout the brain. The knowledge that one distinct area of the brain triggers this kind of deep sleep paves the way for the development of better targeted sedative drugs and sleeping pills. These new drugs could directly hijack this natural mechanism to work more effectively, with fewer side effects and shorter recovery times. “If you don’t sleep for a long period, your body shuts down – almost as if you had taken a drug,” said study co-author Professor Bill Wisden, from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London. “We’ve shown that sedative drugs trigger the same neurons, making the two types of unconsciousness very similar.
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