The Effects of Sleep and Lack of Sleep on the Cerebral Circulation and Metabolism of Normal Young Men 1
Year: 1955
Type: article
Abstract: Numerous hypotheses have been elaborated in attempts to explain the puzzling phenomenon of sleep. Thus sleep has been attributed to arterial anoxemia, to cerebral ischemia or anoxia, or to a generalized narcosis on the basis of one or another metabolic alteration. Little information is avail-able, however, on the subject of cerebral metabo-lism and function during natural sleep. This might be explained to a great extent by the diffi-culties inherent in any experimental investigation during so labile a state as physiological sleep. Moreover, reasonably quantitative techniques for measuring the blood flow and oxygen consumption of the brain in unanesthetized animals and in man have become available only recently. Early at-tempts (1) to obtain at least qualitative informa-tion on the cerebral blood flow in man during sleep by means of brain plethysmography through tre-phine holes have yielded contradictory results. Later attempts with better methods of recording (2) have suggested a decrease in cerebral blood flow on passage from the waking state to short or long periods of sleep. More recently, Gibbs, Gibbs, and Lennox have attempted to obtain a better understanding of the cerebral circulation during sleep by means of the thermoelectric flow recorder (3). They found no significant altera-tion in cerebral blood flow during short periods of sleep in four epileptic patients. Unfortunately, arterio-cerebral venous oxygen differences were not measured simultaneously, and no information on the important question of the oxygen consump-tion of the brain was obtained. Recently developed methods permit a more quantitative determination of the cerebral blood ' This investigation was supported in part by a re-
DOI: 10.1172/jci103158
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W1965920671