UC researchers also find that Ambien heightens recollection of, response to bad memories.

Sara Mednick, UC Riverside

Sleep researchers from University of California campuses in Riverside and San Diego have identified the sleep mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate emotional memory and found that a popular prescription sleep aid heightens the recollection of and response to negative memories.

Their findings have implications for individuals suffering from insomnia related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety disorders who are prescribed zolpidem (Ambien) to help them sleep.

The study — “Pharmacologically Increasing Sleep Spindles Enhances Recognition for Negative and High-arousal Memories” — appears in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. It was funded by a National Institutes of Health career award to Sara C. Mednick, assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside, of $651,999 over five years.

Mednick and UC San Diego psychologists Erik J. Kaestner and John T. Wixted determined that a sleep feature known as sleep spindles — bursts of brain activity that last for a second or less during a specific stage of sleep — are important for emotional memory.

Research Mednick published earlier this year demonstrated the critical role that sleep spindles play in consolidating information from short-term to long-term memory in the hippocampus, located in the cerebral cortex of the brain. Zolpidem enhanced the process, a discovery that could lead to new sleep therapies to improve memory for aging adults and those with dementia, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia. It was the first study to show that sleep can be manipulated with pharmacology to improve memory.

“We know that sleep spindles are involved in declarative memory — explicit information we recall about the world, such as places, people and events, ” she explained.

But until now, researchers had not considered sleep spindles as playing a role in emotional memory , focusing instead on rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

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Antihistamines may increase pregnancy risks for women with severe morning sickness — same condition experienced by Kate Middleton.

Marlena Fejzo, UCLA

Women with a severe form of morning sickness who take antihistamines to help them sleep through their debilitating nausea are significantly more likely to experience premature births or have low–birth-weight babies, a UCLA study has found.

The findings, the first to link antihistamine use to adverse pregnancy outcomes, are important because babies born at 37 weeks or earlier often are hospitalized longer than full-term babies, can experience problems breathing and feeding, are more prone to infection and can suffer from developmental problems. Women with morning sickness who are considering taking such medications should know the risks, said Marlena Fejzo, the study’s lead author an assistant professor of research in obstetrics and gynecology at UCLA.

The severe morning sickness, called hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), is the same condition that Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, recently experienced. Its cause is unknown and the symptoms are intense: The continuous nausea and vomiting can be so violent that women in the study reported suffering from detached retinas, blown eardrums, cracked ribs and torn esophagi, Fejzo said. The symptoms can last for several months or the entire pregnancy.

“It was surprising to find the link between antihistamines and adverse outcomes as these are over-the-counter medications that are used commonly by women with HG during pregnancy,” said Fejzo, who had undiagnosed HG during her first pregnancy and nearly died during her second and lost the baby. “Women and their healthcare providers should be aware of the risk for adverse outcomes when deciding which medications to take to treat their HG symptoms.”

The study appears June 10 in the European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology.

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Poor sleep may be most harmful to women with heart disease, UCSF study finds.

Aric Prather, UC San Francisco

Many women get too little sleep, despite considerable evidence showing the importance of sleep to overall health. Now a new UC San Francisco study has discovered another reason inadequate sleep may be harmful, especially to women and their hearts.

The study found that poor sleep – particularly waking too early – appears to play a significant role in raising unhealthy levels of inflammation among women with coronary heart disease. The elevated inflammation affected only women, not men, even when adjusted for medical, lifestyle and socio-demographic differences, the authors said.

The findings highlight potentially important gender differences and provide evidence that inflammation may serve as a key biological pathway through which poor sleep contributes to the progression of heart disease in women, the researchers reported.

The study will be published online today (June 5) in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

“Inflammation is a well-known predictor of cardiovascular health,” said lead author Aric Prather, Ph.D., a clinical health psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at UCSF. “Now we have evidence that poor sleep appears to play a bigger role than we had previously thought in driving long-term increases in inflammation levels and may contribute to the negative consequences often associated with poor sleep.”

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UC Riverside collaborates with UC San Diego on DoD grant to address the question.

Maxim Bazhenov, UC Riverside

A team of researchers led by a neuroscientist at UC Riverside has been awarded a nearly $7.5 million grant from the Department of Defense to investigate the role of sleep in memory and learning.

“Sleep occupies roughly a third to a half of each day in the majority of mammalian species,” said Maxim Bazhenov, a professor of cell biology and neuroscience and the principal investigator of the five-year grant. “The role of sleep in human and animal life remains a mystery. While sleep is likely to be involved in many processes critical for human and animal well-being, recent evidence suggests that it plays a fundamental role in memory and learning.”

Bazhenov’s laboratory will collaborate with laboratories at UC San Diego, the University of Arizona and Harvard Medical School in the research that aims to explore the role of sleep in memory and learning and to develop biologically realistic computer models of a brain. These models will learn complex patterns, consolidate the resulting memory traces over time in a process that is similar to human sleep, and retrieve the patterns given a cue.

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UC Irvine-led study results suggest new approach to salmonella.

Paolo Sassone-Corsi and Manuela Raffatellu, UC Irvine

Circadian rhythms can boost the body’s ability to fight intestinal bacterial infections, UC Irvine researchers have found.

This suggests that targeted treatments may be particularly effective for pathogens such as salmonella that prompt a strong immune system response governed by circadian genes. It also helps explain why disruptions in the regular day-night pattern – as experienced by, say, night-shift workers or frequent fliers – may raise susceptibility to infectious diseases.

UC Irvine’s Paolo Sassone-Corsi, one of the world’s leading researchers on circadian rhythm genetics, and microbiologist Manuela Raffatellu led the study, which appears this week in the early online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Marina Bellet, a postdoctoral researcher from Italy’s University of Perugia also played a key role in the experiments.

“Although many immune responses are known to follow daily oscillations, the role of the circadian clock in the immune response to acute infections has not been understood,” said Sassone-Corsi, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Chemistry. “What we’re learning is that the intrinsic power of the body clock can help fight infections.”

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UC Davis sleep study finds remarkable changes occur in brain.

A new study conducted by monitoring the brain waves of sleeping adolescents has found that remarkable changes occur in the brain as it prunes away neuronal connections and makes the major transition from childhood to adulthood.

“We’ve provided the first long-term, longitudinal description of developmental changes that take place in the brains of youngsters as they sleep,” said Irwin Feinberg, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the UC Davis Sleep Laboratory. “Our outcome confirms that the brain goes through a remarkable amount of reorganization during puberty that is necessary for complex thinking.”

The research, published in the Feb. 15 issue of American Journal of Physiology: Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology, also confirms that electroencephalogram, or EEG, is a powerful tool for tracking brain changes during different phases of life, and that it could potentially be used to help diagnose age-related mental illnesses. It is the final component in a three-part series of studies carried out over 10 years and involving more than 3,500 all-night EEG recordings. The data provide an overall picture of the brain’s electrical behavior during the first two decades of life.

Feinberg explained that scientists have generally assumed that a vast number of synapses are needed early in life to recover from injury and adapt to changing environments. These multiple connections, however, impair the efficient problem solving and logical thinking required later in life. His study is the first to show how this shift can be detected by measuring the brain’s electrical activity in the same children over the course of time.

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UC Riverside researchers discover sleep mechanism critical to memory consolidation.

Sara Mednick, UC Riverside

A team of sleep researchers led by UC Riverside psychologist Sara C. Mednick has confirmed the mechanism that enables the brain to consolidate memory and found that a commonly prescribed sleep aid enhances the process. Those discoveries could lead to new sleep therapies that will improve memory for aging adults and those with dementia, Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

The groundbreaking research appears in a paper, “The Critical Role of Sleep Spindles in Hippocampal-Dependent Memory: A Pharmacology Study,” published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Earlier research found a correlation between sleep spindles — bursts of brain activity that last for a second or less during a specific stage of sleep — and consolidation of memories that depend on the hippocampus. The hippocampus, part of the cerebral cortex, is important in the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory, and spatial navigation. The hippocampus is one of the first regions of the brain damaged by Alzheimer’s disease.

Mednick and her research team demonstrated, for the first time, the critical role that sleep spindles  play in consolidating memory in the hippocampus, and they showed that pharmaceuticals could significantly improve that process, far more than sleep alone.

In addition to Mednick the research team includes:  Elizabeth A. McDevitt, UC San Diego; James K. Walsh, VA San Diego Healthcare System, La Jolla; Erin Wamsley, St. Luke’s Hospital, St. Louis, Mo.; Martin Paulus, Stanford University; Jennifer C. Kanady, Harvard Medical School; and Sean P.A. Drummond, UC Berkeley.

“We found that a very common sleep drug can be used to increase verbal memory,” said Mednick, the lead author of the paper that outlines results of two studies conducted over five years with a $651,999 research grant from the National Institutes of Health. “This is the first study to show you can manipulate sleep to improve memory. It suggests sleep drugs could be a powerful tool to tailor sleep to particular memory disorders.”

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Time change can wreak havoc on your body.

Susan Golden, UC San Diego

On March 10, clocks across the United States will be moved forward one hour, shifting an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. It’s a time when many of us feel fatigued and listless. And it’s not just because of that lost hour of sleep.

Our biological systems, like those of plants, are intimately tied to the day-night cycle that sets our circadian rhythms. In fact, much of what biologists at UC San Diego are now learning from plants, animals, bacteria and even fungi about the basic biology of circadian rhythms, or chronobiology, is vital to our daily lives.

Half of the U.S. population suffers from some problem in their daily sleep cycle, and shifts caused by Daylight Savings Time, medications, artificial lighting, shift-work, airline travel and 24/7 internet access represent chronobiological—or biological timing—changes that affect our productivity and physical and mental well-being.

Susan Golden, a professor of biology, is co-director of the Center for Chronobiology here, which is combining what scientists across campus are learning about the biological clocks of diverse groups of organisms, from bacteria to fungi to plants to humans, to better understand the basic biology of circadian rhythms. We asked Golden a few questions about the center, which last month brought experts from around the world for a symposium on chronobiology.

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UCLA findings suggests possible new treatment for depression, other disorders.

Jerome Siegel, UCLA

What makes us happy? Family? Money? Love? How about a peptide?

The neurochemical changes underlying human emotions and social behavior are largely unknown. Now though, for the first time in humans, scientists at UCLA have measured the release of a specific peptide, a neurotransmitter called hypocretin, that greatly increased when subjects were happy but decreased when they were sad.

The finding suggests that boosting hypocretin could elevate both mood and alertness in humans, thus laying the foundation for possible future treatments of psychiatric disorders like depression by targeting measureable abnormalities in brain chemistry.

In addition, the study measured for the first time the release of another peptide, this one called melanin concentrating hormone, or MCH. Researchers found that its release was minimal in waking but greatly increased during sleep, suggesting a key role for this peptide in making humans sleepy.

The study is published in the March 5 online edition of the journal Nature Communications.

“The current findings explain the sleepiness of narcolepsy, as well as the depression that frequently accompanies this disorder,” said senior author Jerome Siegel, a professor of psychiatry and director of the Center for Sleep Research at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. “The findings also suggest that hypocretin deficiency may underlie depression from other causes.”

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UCTV airs a woman’s guide to wellness in today’s challenging world.

In today’s fast-paced world, many women face a unique set of pressures as they juggle life at home, at work, with their friends and even their appearance. This six-part UCSF Osher Mini Medical School series on UCTV investigates the origins of these stressors and their physiological impacts, as well as current scientifically-proven strategies for managing priorities, fostering wellness and achieving a balanced portfolio for health.

Programs include:

The Female Brain: Balancing Social Expectations with Your Own Health
First air date: Feb. 4

Body Image: Don’t Let “Ideal” Get in the Way of Real Health
First air date: Feb. 11

Women and Sleep: From Stressful to Restful
First air date: Feb. 18

Mind Your Heart: Stress, Mental Health and Heart Disease
First air date: Feb. 25

Family Caregiving as Fate but also Opportunity: Views from Mind and Body
First air date: March 4

Overcoming the Superwoman Syndrome: Creating Your Personal Path to Wellness
First air date: March 11

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Findings shed new light on some of the forgetfulness common to the elderly.

The connection between poor sleep, memory loss and brain deterioration as we grow older has been elusive.  But for the first time, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a link between these hallmark maladies of old age. Their discovery opens the door to boosting the quality of sleep in elderly people to improve memory.

UC Berkeley neuroscientists have found that the slow brain waves generated during the deep, restorative sleep we typically experience in youth play a key role in transporting memories from the hippocampus – which provides short-term storage for memories – to the prefrontal cortex’s longer term “hard drive.”

However, in older adults, memories may be getting stuck in the hippocampus due to the poor quality of deep ‘slow wave’ sleep, and are then overwritten by new memories, the findings suggest.

“What we have discovered is a dysfunctional pathway that helps explain the relationship between brain deterioration, sleep disruption and memory loss as we get older – and with that, a potentially new treatment avenue,” said UC Berkeley sleep researcher Matthew Walker, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study to be published today (Jan. 27) in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The findings shed new light on some of the forgetfulness common to the elderly that includes difficulty remembering people’s names.

“When we are young, we have deep sleep that helps the brain store and retain new facts and information,” Walker said. “But as we get older, the quality of our sleep deteriorates and prevents those memories from being saved by the brain at night.”

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Study results shed new light on emotional interdependence of sleep partners.

Spouses and other romantic partners often complain about feeling unappreciated, and a new study from UC Berkeley suggests poor sleep may play a hidden role.

A study looking into how sleep habits impact gratitude found that sleep deprivation can leave couples “too tired to say thanks” and can make one or the other partner feel taken for granted.

“Poor sleep may make us more selfish as we prioritize our own needs over our partner’s,” said Amie Gordon, a UC Berkeley psychologist and lead investigator of the study, which she conducted with UC Berkeley psychologist Serena Chen. Gordon presented her findings today (Jan. 19) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychologists in New Orleans.

The results shed new light on the emotional interdependence of sleep partners, offering compelling evidence that a bad night’s sleep leaves people less attuned to their partner’s moods and sensitivities. For many couples, nighttime can turn into a battleground due to loud snoring, sheet-tugging or one partner tapping on a laptop while the other tosses and turns.

“You may have slept like a baby, but if your partner didn’t, you’ll probably both end up grouchy,” Gordon said.

A sixth year Ph.D. student who focuses on the psychology of close relationships, Gordon noted that many people claim to be too busy to sleep, even priding themselves on how few hours of slumber they can get by on. The observation inspired her, in part, to study how a lack of zzzs might be affecting love lives.

More than 60 couples, with ages ranging from 18 to 56, participated in each of Gordon’s studies. In one experiment, participants kept a diary of their sleep patterns and how a good or bad night’s rest affected their appreciation of their significant other.

In another experiment, they were videotaped engaged in problem-solving tasks. Those who had slept badly the night before showed less appreciation for their partner. Overall, the results showed poor sleepers had a harder time counting their blessings and valuing their partners.

How to remedy that? “Make sure to say to say ‘thanks’ when your partner does something nice,” suggested Gordon. “Let them know you appreciate them.”

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