sleep deprivation – The Health Care Blog

Sleep: Watch This Space

Jan 17, 2025

By MIKE MAGEE

In case you’ve missed it, sleep is all the rage in neurosciences these days. They are fast at work rebranding it “the brain’s rinse cycle.” The brain, protectively encased in an unyielding bony casing, lacks the delicate lymphatic system that transports used body metabolites to breakdown and extraction sites in all other parts of the body.

But in 2012, neuroscientist Maiken Nedergaard, identified a unique network of delicate channels (“tiny passages alongside blood vessels”) inside the brain that collect and discharge brain metabolites and waste materials including amyloid. This system, or “ultimate brainwasher” as some labeled it, was formally titled the “glymphatic system.”

That same study also suggested that flow through the glymphatic system is enhanced during portions of the sleep cycle. Now 12 years after the original research, the same team, in a study in mice published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA journal, found that regular contractions or oscillations of tiny blood vessels in the brain, stimulated by adrenaline cousin, norepinephrine, generated the brain scrubbing liquid flow through the channel system. The focal contractions, normally occurring ever 50 seconds, speed up the pump to every 10 seconds, in sync with peaks of norepinephrine release during sleep.

Sleep deprivation appears to not only interrupt this cycle, and allow harmful wastes to accumulate, but also disrupts other mental health functions that scientists are just beginning to understand. For example, researchers in 2021 established that “sleep deprivation impairs people’s ability to suppress unwanted thoughts.” They were able to identify a special location on the brain cortex responsible for storing away memories, and suppressing and delaying their future retrieval. They further demonstrated enhanced activity at the site during REM sleep. As the lead investigator noted, “That’s interesting because many disorders associated with debilitating intrusive thoughts, such as depression and PTSD, are also associated with disturbances in REM.”

The new work may help explain destructive recycling of historic conflicts among and between Silicon Valley AI uber-competitors. They may not be getting enough sleep, recycling historic grudges and grievances.

As the sleep scientists reported in the December, 2024 publication, “The functional impairments arising from sleep deprivation are linked to a behavioral deficit in the ability to downregulate unwanted memories, and coincide with a deterioration of deliberate patterns of self-generated thought. We conclude that sleep deprivation gives rise to intrusive memories via the disruption of neural circuits governing mnemonic inhibitory control, which may rely on REM sleep.”

Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)

TEDMED Goes to Washington

Apr 16, 2012• 1

By Matthew Holt

Last year Priceline founder Jay Walker bought TEDMED –a conference that licenses the TED style and brand but is separately owned from its famous cousin. While there was some fun controversy about the sale, Walker made two key decisions. First he moved the conference from San Diego to Washington D.C. to try to get it more central to the health policy debate, and second he initiated a set of 50 Great Challenges from which the community voted a top 20. These are things like tackling the obesity crisis, getting transparency in medical research, training next generation of leaders and more.

Much of the fun and high production value entertainment from previous years stayed, but there was a new sense of urgency in the air concerning making changes from a top down and bottom up level in the way policy works for science and technology. There was rather less information technology than in years past and more emphasis on things like training of physicians, food policy, and basic science.

Like TED there’s a strong sense of celebrity at TEDMED with entrepreneurs like Walker and buddy AOL founder Steve Case on hand, mixing with newscaster Katie Couric and volleyball pro Gabby Reece. There’s also an interesting (and we hear not cheap) sponsorship model with the exhibit hall being more about zones for discussion rather than tradeshow demos. We like Philips sleep discussion and Booz Allen Hamilton’s discussion area.