THE IMPORTANCE OF A GOOD SLEEP.

Actually, I cam upon this interesting paper. Just did not have time to study it. So many things going on. This PKR Health Camp sure is challenging to organise.
Anyway, finally got to find an abstract of the original paper, at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the USA. The lead author is Dr Carla Moller Levet and the piece of work is done by the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey. The paper is entitled " Effects of insufficient sleep on Circadian rhythmicity and expression amplitude of human blood transcriptome". basically to study the effects of poor sleep on genes and cells.
So Dr Levet and colleagues studied 2 patients. First they deprived them of sleep till less than 6 hours ( mean 5.7 hrs ) for 1 week. at the end of the week, they took blood samples to study the inflammatory and genetic markers of cellular metabolism. They rest them and after 1 week, they subjected them to peaceful sleep of 8 hours or more ( mean of 8.5 hrs ) and again, take blood samples for the same parameters.
They found that sleep deprivation for 1 week was associated with 711 gene alterations, either up regulation of certain genes and down regulation of certain genes. These genes had to do with stress responses and inflammatory responses.
What this means is that with poor / inadequate sleep, our body cells is unable to replace the cells that have end their life cycle, especially cells that had to do with stress responses, inflammatory responses, and also aging.
We certainly know that poor sleep raises BP and increases the incidence of HBP and also strokes. Poor sleep is also associated with a higher incidence of T2DM. There is also a higher incidence of heart attacks in people with poor sleep.
This study shows us that poor sleep changes our risk for CV diseases. The good side ( if there is any ) from this study is that we may be able to look into the genes and inflammatory markers to perhaps help us in knowing who is at risk for CV disease and events.

Interesting. Interesting. Sleep well folks.