He heart After suffering a heart attack, it sends 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.
Scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital have confirmed this. New Yorkone of the world’s leading centers in cardiac and vascular research and surgery, and the results of its work, which are published this Wednesday in the Nature magazinedemonstrate 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 event.
The findings highlight the importance of increasing sleep after a heart attack and suggest that sufficient sleep should be a focus of clinical treatment and care after a heart attack, even in intensive care units, where sleep is disrupted. frequently, along with cardiac rehabilitation.
The researchers They first used mouse models to discover this phenomenon; induced heart attacks in half of the mice and performed high-resolution cellular and imaging analyzesin addition to using implantable wireless electroencephalography devices to record electrical signals from their brains and analyze sleep patterns.
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, they discovered that immune cells called monocytes were recruited from the blood to the brain and 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 occurred 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.
The researchers then used sophisticated methods to manipulate “TNF” neural 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 attackthe researchers also disrupted the sleep of some of the mice.
They found that mice with interrupted sleep after a heart attack had increased sympathetic stress responses in the heart and inflammation, leading to slower recovery and healing compared to mice with uninterrupted sleep.
The research team also conducted several human studies; First, they studied the brains of patients one or two days after a heart attack and discovered an increase in monocytes compared to people without heart attack or other cardiovascular diseasesmirroring their findings in mice.
They also analyzed the sleep of more than 80 heart attack patients during the four weeks after the cardiovascular event and followed them for two years.
The patients were divided into two groups – good and poor 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 good sleepers, and good sleepers experienced a significant improvement in heart function, while poor sleepers improved little or little.