An interesting article about sleep

This is far from an ME study, but it introduces some interesting thoughts about sleep and where the need for sleep originates. It suggests that our focus on the brain is wrong. What that may suggest for our sleep patterns – who knows?

www.quantamagazine.org/sleep-evolved-before-brains-hydras-are-living-proof-20210518/

 

I noticed the article too. My thought is that they discovered a separate sleep function, and that it possibly only applies to simple brainless organisms. I don't think it suggests that we should ignore the neural-refreshing aspects of mammalian sleep.

Neural sleep may have provided the needs for physical rest, and might have replaced the more primitive function.

 

Sleep is highly conserved in evolution so something about it is necessary to the function of the organism. As organisms have become more complex so have the functions of sleep.

Psychological dominance of sleep and dreams may have hidden the fundamental, biological necessity of sleep.

These findings and all modern biomedical studies of sleep may have profound relevance to ME.

 

I wonder whether, in focusing on the role of the brain in sleep, we have missed an important contribution that the muscles and other cells make to the need for sleep. If, as they speculate, that somehow part of the need for sleep is connected to energy supply and cell regeneration, could that be a link between ME/CFS and poor sleep?

It's only wild speculation, but interesting, given that poor quality of sleep seems to be a key feature of ME/CFS.

 

Interesting article, Graham. I use sleep medication pretty regularly, because my experience is that even mild sleep deprivation (even 1 hour less than I need) will exacerbate my muscle pain in particular. To me, it seems incredibly unlikely that I am somehow generating this muscle pain inside my brain, much more likely its the work of inflammatory mechanisms (and my high CRP levels on blood tests, etc., support this too).

So yes, my experience is consistent with the idea that sleep is not just for the brain, its for the whole body.

What I don't fully understand is why just resting my body doesn't have the same effect, it has to be actual sleep. There must be some pretty major reparations going on during sleep that just don't happen in other kinds of rest.

 

I suspect the poor level.of deep sleep noted in ME is part of this.

Deep sleep seems to be when the body's housekeeping functions kick in - liver in particular.

Perhaps this is because with other aspects not in play, there is more energy available to make " housekeeping" happen ?
I did read somewhere that liver at night uses over 35% of available energy . Supposedly this is when asleep.


My daughter's pain and also itchiness get worse if sleep is poor.

 

A while ago I saw an interesting lecture on the glymphatic system which they described as the brain's washing machine and they were wondering if this might be linked to the brain fog and other cognitive challenges in ME. I must go and hunt down to see if they have published anything more recently

 

It could all be fundamentally the same sleep mechanism I imagine, and that when brains finally made an evolutionary appearance they basically hitched a ride on an already-evolved mechanism. Brains were very new in the evolutionary scale of things, and would have had new uses to put this sleep mechanism to; there might well have been evolutionary advantages to not having to delay by inventing a new mechanism from scratch, but instead just adapt to, and build on, an already-existing one. Of course there may well have been evolutionary paths that went their own way, but fizzled out in competition with those that got there ahead of them.

 

Interesting article. I somehow must have slept through - excuse the pun - the whole thing of sleep being considered primarily a brain thing. I always thought sleep was a whole body super-charged rest mechanism that allows all cells to do whatever clean-up and maintenance work they need to do, and that the different sleep phases and dreaming and what have you were kind of side effects of that cellular repair and maintenance in the brain. I've no idea where I got those ideas from.

I clicked a couple of the article links. They went to:

"Bmal1 function in skeletal muscle regulates sleep" (in mice, https://elifesciences.org/articles/26557)

"Interaction Between Sleep and the Immune Response in Drosophila: A Role for the NFκB Relish" (https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/30/4/389/2708189)

Haven't the energy right now to read the papers but if anyone wants to do a deep dive, googling Bmal1 or NFκB in conjunction with ME/CFS both come up with several hits.

 

I have had very minor sleep issues in the 30 yrs of ME.

 

Thank you for the link - interesting reading.
The presentation I saw was from Scandinavian researchers - I will add to the long list of things to investigate!

 

I have always assumed sleep to be a whole-body need, as you say Ravn. But I have also always assumed it to be managed by the brain, and it to be the brain that directs what happens, including doing whatever is needed in order for cells to repair etc. That could still be the case, even if it is a strategy that evolved from no-brain creatures. Or it could be the brain does not perform such a deep managerial role, but instead still lets the body run in sleep mode much that same as for no-brain creatures, and just does the extra bit needed for the brain and associated mechanisms.

 

Especially as a very common feature of ME/CFS is that sleep seems much less restorative than for healthy people. But that also is highly conjectural, because we don't know if it is the restorer, restoree, or both that are compromised.