February 11, 2009 3:15 PM
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The Science Of Sleep
In this experiment, the idea is not to interfere with the quantity of Jonathan's sleep but the quality. Soon after he falls asleep, Jonathan's body naturally wants to enter what's called "deep sleep," but Tasali is determined to stop him without waking him up. Every time his brain starts producing what are called "delta waves," indicating the start of deep sleep, she searches her arsenal of sounds and "attacks."
During a normal night, we cycle through different stages of sleep, progressing from light into deep sleep, then into REM (Rapid eye movement), or dream sleep, and back again. As we age, though, the amount of time we spend in deep sleep decreases.
Van Cauter and Tasali are investigating a novel theory that some of the health problems we typically associate with old age may in fact be caused by the loss of deep sleep.
"We lose deep sleep at a very early age. So a young, healthy person may have 100 minutes of deep sleep, and at 50 years old it may be as little as 20 minutes. So it really… goes down very quickly," Van Cauter explains.
Tasali's goal is to turn 19-year-old Jonathan, sleep-wise, into a 70-year-old.
The next morning - 346 sounds later - it's time for testing. Now Jonathan's going to have fat extracted from his body for analysis, go through a PET scan to see how his brain is metabolizing sugar, and between procedures, he's answering questions about how he feels. His doctors assure 60 Minutes that Jonathan will be fine once he goes back to his normal sleep routine, but after four nights without deep sleep they have found that, like prior study subjects, he is hungrier, less alert, and most importantly, his body is no longer able to metabolize sugar effectively, putting him temporarily at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes.
"We usually think of diabetes as something that's a disease of old age. But really it may be a disease of sleep deprivation," Stahl remarks.
"I would say that sleep deprivation may be a new risk factor for diabetes," Van Cauter says. "Not just aging, not just being overweight or obese, not just having a family history of diabetes, which are the three major risk factors. But this is an added one. And we have really an epidemic of diabetes now. And Type 2 diabetes is now occurring in children, in adolescents. And, you know, adolescents and children too are also being sleep deprived. Maybe high schoolers are amongst the most sleep deprived individuals in our society, because they have an enormous sleep need - nine to ten hours. Yet they sleep less than seven hours per night."
She says this research proves we all need to rethink what we consider essential for good health - that the diet and exercise formula also has to include sleep.
So if lack of sleep impacts our appetite, our metabolism, our memory, and how we age, is there anything it doesn't affect? How about sex? Scientist Scott McRobert at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is asking that very question, studying fruit flies.
Stahl watched as McRobert used a bizarre contraption to suck a male drosophila (fruit fly) out of a vial and put him into a little dish with a female.
McRobert gave Stahl a play-by-play of the action. "Okay. So now, the female's walking around the outside of the chamber," McRobert explains. "And the male's in the center. And you see he's orienting toward her, everywhere she goes."
"He's following her. If you watch closely, he'll touch her with his front legs. It's hard to see, but he will. And he'll sing. Here comes the song," McRobert says.
Flies sing, he tells Stahl, by lifting one wing to the side and vibrating it up and down.
McRobert is doing a study to see whether sleep-deprivation in fruit flies affects mating. The two flies in the dish had regular amounts of sleep. "And when he's in the presence of a sexually attractive female, he's just courting and doing almost nothing else," he says.
Eventually, the flies did mate.
Copyright 2009 CBS. All rights reserved. During a normal night, we cycle through different stages of sleep, progressing from light into deep sleep, then into REM (Rapid eye movement), or dream sleep, and back again. As we age, though, the amount of time we spend in deep sleep decreases.
Van Cauter and Tasali are investigating a novel theory that some of the health problems we typically associate with old age may in fact be caused by the loss of deep sleep.
"We lose deep sleep at a very early age. So a young, healthy person may have 100 minutes of deep sleep, and at 50 years old it may be as little as 20 minutes. So it really… goes down very quickly," Van Cauter explains.
Tasali's goal is to turn 19-year-old Jonathan, sleep-wise, into a 70-year-old.
The next morning - 346 sounds later - it's time for testing. Now Jonathan's going to have fat extracted from his body for analysis, go through a PET scan to see how his brain is metabolizing sugar, and between procedures, he's answering questions about how he feels. His doctors assure 60 Minutes that Jonathan will be fine once he goes back to his normal sleep routine, but after four nights without deep sleep they have found that, like prior study subjects, he is hungrier, less alert, and most importantly, his body is no longer able to metabolize sugar effectively, putting him temporarily at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes.
"We usually think of diabetes as something that's a disease of old age. But really it may be a disease of sleep deprivation," Stahl remarks.
"I would say that sleep deprivation may be a new risk factor for diabetes," Van Cauter says. "Not just aging, not just being overweight or obese, not just having a family history of diabetes, which are the three major risk factors. But this is an added one. And we have really an epidemic of diabetes now. And Type 2 diabetes is now occurring in children, in adolescents. And, you know, adolescents and children too are also being sleep deprived. Maybe high schoolers are amongst the most sleep deprived individuals in our society, because they have an enormous sleep need - nine to ten hours. Yet they sleep less than seven hours per night."
She says this research proves we all need to rethink what we consider essential for good health - that the diet and exercise formula also has to include sleep.
So if lack of sleep impacts our appetite, our metabolism, our memory, and how we age, is there anything it doesn't affect? How about sex? Scientist Scott McRobert at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is asking that very question, studying fruit flies.
Stahl watched as McRobert used a bizarre contraption to suck a male drosophila (fruit fly) out of a vial and put him into a little dish with a female.
McRobert gave Stahl a play-by-play of the action. "Okay. So now, the female's walking around the outside of the chamber," McRobert explains. "And the male's in the center. And you see he's orienting toward her, everywhere she goes."
"He's following her. If you watch closely, he'll touch her with his front legs. It's hard to see, but he will. And he'll sing. Here comes the song," McRobert says.
Flies sing, he tells Stahl, by lifting one wing to the side and vibrating it up and down.
McRobert is doing a study to see whether sleep-deprivation in fruit flies affects mating. The two flies in the dish had regular amounts of sleep. "And when he's in the presence of a sexually attractive female, he's just courting and doing almost nothing else," he says.
Eventually, the flies did mate.
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