Sleep Disorders

The brains of people complaining sleep disorders may be less wired to block out noise, according to researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

One in three Americans get enough sleep, while 10 percent of them report difficulty sleeping and other 16 percent have insomnia or other chronic sleep disorders.

The researchers recruited 12 volunteers with no prior sleep disorders, having the ages between 20 and 46. These solid sleepers spent three nights in a comfortable room, having four speakers near their bed, being exposed to 14 different recorded sounds, like toilets flushing, street traffic, people talking or airplane flying.

The researchers quantified the sleep quality using electroencephalography (EEG) imaging, confirming that communication between cortex and thalamus is not interrupted during sleep. This activity was represented by energetic waves which slow down when the sleep become deeper, but they are interspersed with some brief and fast pulses called sleep spindles because they only appear during sleep. They are generated by thalamus and protect the brain from noise disruptions. It was observed that the subjects with higher spindle production were harder to wake up.

Understanding this process the scientists will be helped for a new level of research and even for a better treating of sleep disorders. Sleep quality may influence overall health and the study is very important, but it didn’t found a connection between sleep disorder and some neurological problems. However more research is needed, but the study shows that the best sleep occur when the thalamus is highly active.

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