Health Watch is a Public Service of the Office of News and Publications and is intended to provide general information only and should not replace the advice of a medical professional. You should contact your physician if you have questions about any of these topics.
This week on Healthwatch, we're talking about mental wellness. While our bodies need sleep to function physically, sleep is also important to mental wellness. Insomnia and chronic sleep loss are common problems, and sleep disruption is associated with all of the major psychiatric disorders.
Doctors at UT Southwestern Medical Center have recently uncovered some of the processes that bring about sleep. In a recent study, they found that prolonged neural activity - staying awake a long time - triggers a compound in the brain that slows neural activity, bringing about sleepiness. Caffeine helps keep us awake by interfering with this process, keeping that compound from working.
Dr. Robert W. Greene, the UT Southwestern psychiatrist who led the study, says understanding how we fall asleep can help doctors learn what's going wrong when we can't sleep, and that could lead to better treatments for insomnia.
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June 2005
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