Better Sleep with Minimal Hours? ADRB1 Gene Suspected

  Sleep. Too much or not enough may cause the rest of your day to either be miserable and/or not as productive as desired. For Brad Johnson and many of his family members, this is not an issue. They have the ability to run on less than 8 hours of sleep consistently without drawbacks. How? Well, this is due to them having a mutated gene named ADRB1 (Figure 1A depicts a pedigree of an affected family) which directly determines the amount of sleep people need (other genes may also play a role in this as well). The people who have this gene (or are heterozygotes) are labeled as “natural short sleepers” and it only shows up in around 1 in every 25,000 people.

  Having the ability to do more and sleep less would be a fairly ideal situation. If utilized to its fullest extent (especially if you'd need only a couple hours of sleep), much could get done before the day has even begun. It would also be assumable that this would have a negative effect on affected persons. Yet, from what was shown in the article, Brad Johnson has been living a fulfilling life, participating in multiple hobbies and had a good career (in which he is now retired). Even the researchers, Dr. Fu and Dr. Ptacek, have stated that natural short sleepers are both optimistic and resilient. It may be early in this research, but this may open up a lot of new doors in understanding sleep in humans.

Links:

-         -  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/science/sleep-gene.html

-        -  https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30652-X

Researchers Identify Second Short Sleep Gene

Scientists have discovered a second short sleep gene, which is a gene that promotes natural short sleep, meaning 4-6 hours of sleep every night for an individual but they wake up feeling completely rested.  The first gene was discovered in 2009 where researchers found that people who had a specific mutation in a gene called DEC2 got on average 6.25 hours of sleep every night but did not seem to have any negative effects from that short amount of sleep. 

In the new study, researchers found another mutation in a gene called ADRB1 that was also linked with natural short sleep.  It was found that humans with the mutated gene slept on average about 2 hours less than humans with the normal gene.  Scientists performed experiments on mice with the mutated version of the gene.  The mice with the mutated gene slept 55 minutes less than the normal mice.  The ADRB1 gene was also shown at high levels in parts of the brain that are involved in subconscious activities.  They also found that normal ADRB1 neurons were more active during wakefulness and REM sleep and they found that the mutated ADRB1 neurons were more active than the normal neurons, which likely was a factor of short sleep.  I find it pretty interesting that genetics is the reason why some people can get 5 hours of sleep per night but still wake up completely refreshed the next morning.  Perhaps by conducting more studies on short sleepers, they could help people who don't have the mutated gene to find ways to still feel refreshed in the morning even without as much sleep. 

http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/second-short-sleep-gene-07559.html
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30652-X
https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/gene/ADRB1