Scientists have discovered a gene that helps a mother and daughter remain vigilant in approximately six hours of sleep a night, two hours less than the rest of your family needs.
Believed to be a very rare mutation not an excuse for the rest of us who stay up late. But the finding, published in the Friday edition of the journal Science, offers a new place to study how sleep affects health.
The National Institutes of Health says that adults need seven hours to nine hours of sleep for good health. Usually too little increased risk of health problems, including memory and a weakened immune system. A major study in 2006 estimated that some 30 million Americans suffer from chronic insomnia, and millions more have other sleep disorders including sleep apnea.
University of California, San Francisco, researchers have long hunted genes related to how and where people sleep. In 2001, they found a mutation that makes their carriers, sleep patterns at once: They regularly go to bed around 7:30 pm and after about 3:30 a.m.
Now the same team has found a gene involved in regulating the duration of sleep. In one family, 69 years old and mother of his 44 years, daughter usually go to bed around 10 pm, and Mom gets up around 4 and her daughter around 4:30, without apparent adverse effects . The rest of the family of typical sleep patterns.
Blood tests showed that women harbored a mutation in a gene called DEC2 involved in regulating circadian rhythms, the body clock. A check of more than 250 DNA samples stored not find another company.
Then the principal researcher Ying-Hui Fu, a professor of neurology and colleagues bred mice and fruit flies carrying the mutation. Of course, flies and brain-wave measurements on the mice showed people with the mutation were sleeping less – and mice require less time to recover from sleep deprivation.
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