Variants in Water Channel Gene Tied to More Restful Sleep

This paper’s exciting because it gives the first hint that maybe in humans the way we sleep and how deeply we sleep might actually be coupled to how efficient our brains are at carrying out this fluid flow exchange process, reports The Scientist.

Although previous studies have shown that people have some aspects of the glymphatic system, it’s not clear whether the factors responsible for fluid flow are also present in humans. The transgenic and radio-label tracing methods researchers have used to explore the glymphatic system in rodents are too invasive to be used in people, so when Sebastian Holst, a postdoc in the Neurobiology Research Unit at Copenhagen University Hospital, and his colleagues wanted to look for more evidence of the glymphatic system in the human brain, they needed another way in.

Get the full story at the-scientist.com

from Sleep Review https://ift.tt/2X1WAjE