The heart sends after suffering a heart attack some signals to the brain to trigger a greater desire to sleep and thus accelerate the recovery process, since this rest can help reduce inflammation.
This has been verified by scientists from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, one of the world’s leading centers in cardiac and vascular research and surgery, and the results of their work, which are published this Wednesday in the journal Nature, demonstrate for the first time how the heart and brain communicate with each other through the immune system to promote sleep and recovery after a serious cardiovascular episode.
The conclusions highlight the importance of increasing sleep after a myocardial infarction and suggest that getting enough sleep should be a focus of clinical treatment and post-stroke care, including in intensive care units, where sleep is frequently interrupted, along with cardiac rehabilitation.
The researchers They first used mouse models to discover this phenomenon; They induced heart attacks in half of the mice and performed high-resolution cellular and imaging analyses, in addition to using implantable wireless electroencephalography devices to record electrical signals from their brains and analyze sleep patterns.
deep sleep phase
After the heart attack, they observed a threefold increase in slow-wave sleep, a deep phase of sleep characterized by slow brain waves and less muscle activity, An increase in sleep occurred quickly after the heart attack and lasted for a week.
When researchers studied the brains of stroked mice, discovered that immune cells called “monocytes” were recruited from the blood to the brain and they used a protein called “tumor necrosis factor” (TNF) to activate neurons in an area of the brain called the thalamus, which caused increased sleep.
This happened a few hours after the cardiac event, and none of this occurred in the mice that did not suffer heart attacks, as the researchers explained in the summary provided by the magazine.
Next, the researchers used sophisticated methods to manipulate “TNF” neuronal signaling in the thalamus and discovered that the sleeping brain uses the nervous system to send signals to the heart to reduce cardiac stress, promote healing, and decrease cardiac inflammation after a heart attack.
To better identify the role of increased sleep after a heart attack, researchers also interrupted the sleep of some of the mice.
So they verified that mice with interrupted sleep After a heart attack, they showed an increase in the heart’s sympathetic stress responses and inflammation, which caused slower recovery and healing compared to mice with uninterrupted sleep.
The research team also conducted several studies in humans.; First, they studied the brains of patients one or two days after a heart attack and found an increase in monocytes compared to people without heart attacks or other cardiovascular diseases, mirroring their findings in mice.
Sleep quality
They also analyzed the sleep of more than 80 patients with heart attack during the four weeks after the cardiovascular episode and they followed them for two years.
The patients were divided into two groups –good and bad sleepers based on the quality of their sleep during the four weeks following the heart attack, and the researchers found that patients who slept poorly in the weeks after the heart attack had a worse prognosis.
Their risk of suffering another cardiovascular event was twice that of those who slept welland these experienced a significant improvement in cardiac function, while those who slept poorly did not improve or improved very little.
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