Roles of sleep in cognitive, neural and physiological functions

这项拟议的研究计划的目标是帮助我们理解睡眠在人类生理和行为中所扮演的角色。我们对睡眠如何有助于正常生理功能以及睡眠缺失如何影响重要的调节机制的几个方面感兴趣。 一个目标是更好地了解睡眠是如何通过调节参与新陈代谢的激素来影响食欲和体重的。特别关注的是睡眠如何与女性不断变化的内分泌特征相互作用，以改变食欲和体重调节。我们将研究急性或慢性睡眠不足对处于不同荷尔蒙状态的年轻女性月经周期不同阶段的内分泌活动和食物摄入量调节的影响。我们还将调查在经历了与更年期相关的荷尔蒙变化的女性中，睡眠不足的这些影响是如何潜在地改变的。关于睡眠中断在这一时期很常见，如何影响生命这一阶段的新陈代谢，目前还没有相关信息。 我们还将使用两种记录大脑活动的方法：脑电图法和脑磁图法，研究睡眠如何影响认知功能，以及可能调节睡眠在帮助巩固新获得的技能方面的作用的神经机制。我们将研究白天小睡在逆转睡眠不足对巩固过程的影响方面所起的作用。用来评估睡眠作用的主要工具是操纵睡眠时间，无论是急性还是慢性，以评估对生理和行为的影响。我们建议获得的关于睡眠功能的基本知识最终可能适用于改善交通、制造业、保护服务和其他经济部门的工作/休息安排。

The goal of the proposed research program is to contribute to our understanding of the roles played by sleep in human physiology and behaviour. We are interested in several aspects of how sleep contributes to normal physiological functions and how sleep loss affects important regulatory mechanisms. One goal is to better understand how sleep influences appetite and body weight by regulating hormones that are involved in metabolism. A particular focus is on how sleep interacts with changing endocrine profiles in women to alter appetite and body weight regulation. We will investigate the impact of either acute or more chronic sleep loss on endocrine activity and on regulation of food intake in young women in different hormonal states at different phases of their menstrual cycles. We will also investigate how these impacts of sleep loss are potentially altered in women who have undergone the hormonal changes related to menopause. There is no information available about how sleep disruption, which is common during this period, affects metabolism at this stage of life. We will also study how sleep affects cognitive functions and the neural mechanisms that may mediate the role of sleep in helping to consolidate newly acquired skills, using two methods of recording brain activity: electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography. We will study the role of daytime naps in reversing the effects of sleep loss on this consolidation process. The main tool to be used to assess the role of sleep is manipulating sleep durations, either acutely or chronically, to assess the effects on physiology and behaviour. The basic knowledge we propose to acquire about the functions of sleep may ultimately be applicable to improving work/rest scheduling in transportation, manufacturing, protection services and other economic sectors.