LACK of sleep could be worse for the body than we thought, at least if humans react to it in the same way as rats do.
Tarja Porkka-Heiskanen of the University of Helsinki, Finland, and her team discovered that rats seem to mount an immune response to sleep deprivation, producing molecules that ordinarily are associated with stress. This suggests that chronic sleep deprivation could lead to stress-related illness, such as heart disease, for example.
Porkka-Heiskanen’s team was studying how the brain triggers “recovery” sleep to overcome the effects of sleep loss. Their earlier work in rats had shown that levels of nitric oxide increase in the…
