Coffee has long been a short-lived solution after a bad night’s sleep. It provides a short-lived energy boost that you have to pretend you’re not working at about half capacity. Of course, coffee won’t replace sleep, and previous research has shown that its effects in this regard are short-lived at best.
But it’s all coffee after a bad dream. Fresh research shows that regular coffee consumption leading to sleep disorders may actually counteract their effects.
As reported Incthe up-to-date study is the work of scientists from Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore and recently appeared in the magazine . To do this, they examined how sleep deprivation and caffeine affect the CA2 area of the hippocampus, a part of the brain crucial for processing social memory. Social memory is the shared recollection of the past within a particular group or community and used by members of that group to distinguish others within it.
For the study, the researchers “induced five hours of sleep deprivation” in laboratory mice. As expected, sleep deprivation disrupted the mice’s ability to recognize another mouse they had previously encountered. When the researchers measured synaptic plasticity, they found impaired communication between neurons and the CA2 region, which reduces the ability to form up-to-date social memories.
However, when mice were given an aqueous solution of caffeine seven days before induced sleep deprivation, CA2 plasticity and synaptic communication returned to normal levels. Not only were social memory deficits reversed, but researchers noticed that caffeine only affected specific neural pathways, rather than increasing all neural activity in the brain. This means that “the control group… showed no signs of overstimulation despite exposure to caffeine.”
“Sleep deprivation not only causes fatigue. It selectively disrupts critical memory circuits,” says lead author Dr. Lik-Wei Wong. “We found that caffeine can reverse these disruptions at both the molecular and behavioral levels. Its ability to do this suggests that caffeine’s benefits may go beyond simply helping us stay awake.”
Although mice and humans are biologically similar, further research will need to be conducted to determine whether similar effects occur in humans. However, the best bandage for a sleepless night may not be your morning coffee the next day. These may be those from the previous week.
