Until recently, astrocytes were only recognized as the “glue” that binds the brain together. However, a study contends that they play a considerably more significant function.
According to a recent study, astrocytes, a type of understudied brain cell, are crucial in controlling sleep deprivation. According to the study, humans will eventually be able to go without sleep for extended periods of time without suffering negative consequences like deteriorated physical health or mental tiredness.
In the Journal of Neuroscience, the study has been published. According to ANI, a news agency, the study discovered that stimulating astrocytes kept mice up while they should have been sleeping for hours. And it didn’t make them any more sleepy.
Marcos Frank, a neuroscientist and professor at the Washington State University Elson S Floyd College of Medicine, is the study’s senior author. “Extended wakefulness normally increases sleep time and intensity, but what we saw in this study was that despite hours of added wakefulness these mice did not differ from well-rested controls in terms of how long and how intensely they slept,” he said.
This raises the prospect that one day we may develop treatments that specifically target astrocytes to lessen the harmful effects of extended awake.
Lack of sleep or irregular sleep patterns affect many different functions, including immune system and metabolism as well as cognition, learning, and memory.
Cells called astrocytes communicate with neurons. These cells are not neurons. From the brain to various areas of the body, neurons transmit electrical signals that are simple to measure.
Until recently, astrocytes were only recognized as the “glue” that binds the brain together. They have been discovered to play an active role in behaviors and processes more recently. Calcium signaling, a challenging to measure process, is how they accomplish this.
This includes a prior WSU work that shown that mice developed a lower desire for sleep after sleep deprivation when astrocyte calcium transmission was suppressed across the brain.
In the current investigation, astrocytes found in the basal forebrain were the focus of the researchers’ attention. This part of the brain is crucial in regulating how much sleep a person needs and how much time they spend awake and asleep.
According to first author Ashley Ingiosi, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Ohio State University who conducted the research while a postdoctoral research associate in Frank’s lab at Washington State University, “our findings suggest that our need for sleep isn’t just a function of prior wake time but is also driven by these long-ignored non-neuronal cells.”
“We can now begin to define the precise mechanisms by which astrocytes interact with neurons to elicit this response and how they control the expression and regulation of sleep in various brain regions.”