One sleepless night can contribute to the brain feeling years older, writes a joint study by Danish, Swiss and German researchers from the Forschungszentrum Jülich Center. Significant changes in the structure of the brain were observed in subjects who were deprived of sleep for only one night.
Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience shows that just one night without sleep can cause significant changes in the structure of the brain, making it look one or two years older. Analyzes show that as many as a third of adults suffer from insomnia at least once in their lives and have problems sleeping, and as a result of lack of sleep there is a feeling of exhaustion and difficulties in performing daily activities. But as things stand, it seems that lack of sleep could have much more serious consequences - and that on the brain.
How much does the brain age during one night without sleep?
In an international study, a team of researchers analyzed brain magnetic resonance imaging data of 134 healthy research participants, ages 19 to 39. The researchers exposed them to different sleep conditions for five nights - from total sleep deprivation (deprivation) for 24 hours, partial deprivation of three hours of no sleep during the night, and chronic deprivation, which included five awake hours during the night, reports B92.
A control group of subjects who slept 8 hours during the night was also included in the research. Participants from each study group were able to sleep at least one full night, that is, 8 hours continuously. Every morning, a brain scan was made with the calculation of its apparent age, and the results showed that the group of subjects with complete deprivation, sleep disorder, had significant changes in the structure of the brain and the greatest increase in the age of the brain, which was a year or two older.
The good news is that a sleepless night can be made up for
However, as the researchers explained after the study, the good news is that this "aging of the brain" can be reversed if a person can compensate for the lost hours of sleep with sleep. It is interesting that after just one night of sound sleep, the age of the brain returned to its "old" state and no longer differed from the initial measurement values.
"In short, we proved that in the young participants of the study, only acute and complete loss of sleep changes the morphology of the brain in a way that makes it older, as well as that all changes are reversible, they can go back to the old way and are corrected by additional sleep, which improves the structure of the brain is recovering," the scientists concluded.
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