Review Science Signaling - Sleep loss is a metabolic disorder - Feeny et al - 2025

Thought this could be of interest to the forum. The paper is paywalled except for the abstract:

Sleep loss dysregulates cellular metabolism and energy homeostasis.

Highly metabolically active cells, such as neurons, enter a catabolic state during periods of sleep loss, which consequently disrupts physiological functioning.

Specific to the central nervous system, sleep loss results in impaired synaptogenesis and long-term memory, effects that are also characteristic of neurodegenerative diseases.

In this review, we describe how sleep deprivation increases resting energy expenditure, leading to the development of a negative energy balance—a state with insufficient metabolic resources to support energy expenditure—in highly active cells like neurons.

This disruption of energetic homeostasis alters the balance of metabolites, including adenosine, lactate, and lipid peroxides, such that energetically costly processes, such as synapse formation, are attenuated.

During sleep loss, metabolically active cells shunt energetic resources away from those processes that are not acutely essential, like memory formation, to support cell survival.

Ultimately, these findings characterize sleep loss as a metabolic disorder.

 

Downloaded this a few days ago but didn't get chance to look at it - at first glance this looks like quite an interesting review. Skimming through it looking for anything tangentially related to ME/CFS there's discussion of the effects of sleep loss on lipid metabolism, antioxidant activity (including a brief mention of SOD activity being affected by chronic sleep restriction) and insulin sensitivity - I wasn't aware, for instance, that insulin resistance would be increased by just one night of partial sleep deprivation:

 

PEM gives me insomnia. So, I get the after effects of insomnia as well.

There is something in PEM affects the sleep mechanism. So a before sleep problem rather than an after.