Posted on 04/09/2013 6:43:34 PM PDT by neverdem
Insomniacs desperate for some zzzs may one day have a safer way to get them. Scientists have developed a new sleep medication that has induced sleep in rodents and monkeys without apparently impairing cognition, a potentially dangerous side effect of common sleep aids. The discovery, which originated in work explaining narcolepsy, could lead to a new class of drugs that help people who don't respond to other treatments.
Between 10% and 15% of Americans chronically struggle with getting to or staying asleep. Many of them turn to sleeping pills for relief, and most are prescribed drugs, such as zolpidem (Ambien) and eszopiclone (Lunesta), that slow down the brain by binding to receptors for GABA, a neurotransmitter that's involved in mood, cognition, and muscle tone. But because the drugs target GABA indiscriminately, they can also impair cognition, causing amnesia, confusion, and other problems with learning and memory, along with a number of strange sleepwalking behaviors, including wandering, eating, and driving while asleep. This has led many researchers to seek out alternative mechanisms for inducing sleep.
Neuroscientist Jason Uslaner of Merck Research Laboratories in West Point, Pennsylvania, and colleagues decided to tap into the brain's orexin system. Orexin (also known as hypocretin) is a protein that controls wakefulness and is missing in people with narcolepsy. Past studies successfully induced sleep by inhibiting orexin, but had not looked into its effects on cognition. The researchers developed a new orexin-inhibiting compound called DORA-22 and confirmed that it could induce sleep in rats and rhesus monkeys as effectively as the GABA-modulating drugs.
Then the researchers went about testing the drugs' effects on the animals' cognition. They measured the rats' cognition and memory by assessing the rodents' ability to recognize objects. They presented the rats with a new object—say, a cone or a sphere—that the rats then sniffed and explored. Then they took the object away for an hour. After that hour, the rats were exposed to a new object and the one they'd already gotten to know; if the rats remembered, they spent less time checking out the familiar object. With the primates, Uslaner's team tested their ability to match colors on a touchscreen and to pay attention to and identify the origin of a flashing light. In all the cases, the researchers found the GABA-modulating sleeping pills caused both the rats and the primates to respond more slowly and less accurately. Monkeys taking the memory and attention tests, for example, were 20% less accurate on the highest dose of each of the GABA-modulating drugs. But DORA-22 had no such effect on cognition, the team reports today in Science Translational Medicine.
"We were very excited," Uslaner says. "Folks who take sleep medications need to be able to perform cognitive tasks when they awake, and this [compound] could help them do so without impairment."
Although DORA-22 has not yet been tested in humans, it holds tremendous promise for helping people suffering from sleep disorders, says Emmanuel Mignot, a sleep researcher with the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. "This study is encouraging and exciting, because there's good reason to believe it would work differently from what we've used in the past," says Mignot, who helped discover the link between orexin (or its absence) and narcolepsy. "Not every drug works for everyone, so it's really, really good news to have a potential new drug on the horizon."
Eat a spoonful of honey right before you go to bed. Go ahead, try it for a few days.
A CD of Biden speeches ?
I find the radio station on Direct TV (channel 856) to be a great sleep aid. Soft music. The station is called “New Age”. Anybody else listen to it?
I don’t listen to that, but I do have New Age relaxation music on my IPod and listen to that when I have trouble sleeping. I also like Celestial Seasons Sleepytime tea. It relaxes me so much and helps me to sleep without waking up feeling lethargic the next morning,. I drank it every day in the weeks leading up to the election.
Great music! Love it to sleep or when writing/working.
Reminds me of the music they played on subliminal tapes.
Back in the 1980s friend of mine who was overweight would listen to a weight loss tape in his car. Unfortunately he once listened to the self-hypnotic side and not the subliminal side and he was driving. He fell asleep and crashed his car. Major accident. He ended up in the hospital for several weeks, lost feet of his intestines. In the end, he lost about 100 pounds which was a few pounds below his targeted weight. True story!
Melatonin.
Trazodone.
AMEN!
I used to use Ambien which left me groggy in the morning. Melatonin works just a well, is cheaper and doesn’t have me walking around in the middle of the night fast asleep.
And cocaine.
And ambien too.. At the start it was touted as non-tolerance and non-addictive.
I tturn on a rain app on my kindle with a low rumble of thunder in the background — works very well
Awwww Hell Naw!!
I have a terrible problem with insomnia. My body is tired, but my mind just won’t slow down. A melatonin helps me get to sleep, but doesn’t keep me asleep. About two in the morning I am wide awake, take a Benydryl and read FR. That helps. I refuse to use any prescription drugs for sleep.
Really! They give wierd dreams? In the summer I take one a day because I'm allergic to bee stings and someone told me that it's a good thing to take as it may lesson the effects of the bee sting.
When I was trying to stop smoking the doctor gave me those pills to help you stop (Chantex(sp) or something like that) those gave me wierd dreams. I stopped taking them and went to E-Cigs.
I didn't like that at all.
Eat a spoonful of honey right before you go to bed. Go ahead, try it for a few days.
No sugar rush?
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