MiRNAs can predict physiological response to total sleep deprivation
Why is it that some people function on just four hours of sleep per night while others cannot so without their eight hours?
The key may lie in microRNAs (miRNAs), according to a new study from researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Many studies connect sleep loss with cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and other disorders, and it is well known that sleep loss negatively affects cognitive performance.
However, those adverse effects are experienced differently from person to person, and little is known about how to accurately predict and detect these individual sleep-deprivation deficits.
This study is the first to find that microRNAs in the blood are changed by total sleep deprivation (TSD) for 39 hours, and by psychological stress. Thus they can predict the resulting cognitive performance in adults.
MiRNAs are small non-coding RNAs and are key regulators of gene expression, which guides information in a gene to be made into a functional protein.
The authors say the findings can be used to identify who is most at risk for the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
MiRNAs are small non-coding RNAs and are key regulators of gene expression, which guides information in a gene to be made into a functional protein. MiRNAs typically repress expression of their target messenger RNAs, preventing translation into proteins.
The findings will be presented at SLEEP 2018, the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC (APSS) in Baltimore.
In the study, 32 healthy adults participated in a five-day experiment consisting of two, 8-hour baseline nights, followed by 39 hours of total sleep deprivation (TSD), in which they were not allowed to sleep, and followed by two, 8-to-10-hour recovery nights.
Subjects underwent testing for attention, memory, and cognitive throughput, i.e., how fast and accurate the brain performs.
“These findings show for the first time that miRNAs can track responses to total sleep deprivation and its detrimental combination with psychological stress and predict robust individual differences in various types of cognitive performance,” said senior author Namni Goel, PhD, an associate professor of Psychology in Psychiatry.
