- 05 Feb 2009, 04:15
#1378702
BTW, Genetika IMA veze sa spavanjem. Malo toga nema veze sa genetikom, ukoliko je dokazano da psiholoski /socijalni faktori problema nisu u pitanju (tu ne govorimo o psihijatriskim poremecajima koji imaju veze sa hemijskim disbalansom mozga kao sto je manicna depresija, sto opet ima veze sa genetikom, kao i shizofrenija)
Sleep Disorders Traced to Genes
Randy Dotinga Email 11.30.04
If you like to go to sleep after Conan O'Brien or wake up shortly before lunch, you may have your ancestors to blame.
Researchers at two American universities suspect that night owls inherit their sleep patterns, and they're launching a study that could lead to new gene therapy for everyone from insomniacs to early birds who can't help but hit the sack before prime time.
It may be years, even decades, before gene-based drugs compete with the traditional insomnia remedies of sleeping pills, warm milk or hot toddies.
Researchers only began to seriously explore the genetics of sleep in the mid-1990s, and they're far from determining which genes are in charge of the body clock. Even so, there appears to be a general consensus that many of us don't voluntarily choose to be short sleepers or long sleepers, morning people or night people.
"For some time now, doctors who see people with sleep disorders have been documenting a familial relationship in these things. That's commonly the first way that people start thinking about a particular disease as being genetic, by seeing it cluster in families," said Dr. Walt Klimecki, a geneticist at the University of Arizona who is working with sleep researchers at the University of California at San Diego.
Indeed, researchers have discovered that some people seem to inherit a pesky early-to-sleep/early-to-rise syndrome. A notorious sleep disease -- the rare fatal familial insomnia, which robs people of sleep until they die from lack of it -- also runs in families.
Researchers at UCSD are recruiting Southern California night owls to undergo monitoring and genetic testing to see if their condition is inherited too. The participants have a condition called delayed sleep-phase syndrome and typically prefer to go to bed in the early hours of the morning and wake up after 9 or 10 a.m., when many people are already caffeinated and ready for work.
This sort of behavior won't sound unusual to countless college students or teenagers. But in the most severe cases of the syndrome, simply trying to go to bed earlier doesn't work, according to UCSD sleep researcher Dr. Dan Kripke.
"Some people are quite disabled by delayed sleep phase if their school work or employment requires them to get up early," he said. "They could voluntarily get up in the middle of their sleep period, but after a few days, they become so sleep-deprived, they can't continue to do it for the long run."
Perhaps 1 percent of the population has the disorder, Kripke said.
For reasons that aren't clear, it's much rarer for people to have the opposite condition -- advanced sleep-phase syndrome -- and be unable to postpone sleep past 7 or 8 p.m. Researchers elsewhere have already identified at least one of the genes that appear to cause that problem.
Extremely bright light boxes, which try to reset our internal clocks by making our bodies think it's morning, are a common treatment for sleep-phase disorders. Some patients take melatonin, a signaling hormone that can manipulate the body clock by tricking it into thinking it's dark and time for bed.
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