Drug Reverses Effects of Sleep Deprivation

Ryan O'Rourke writes "According to a study led by Dr. Sam A. Deadwyler and published by the Public Library of Science Biology, a new drug called CX717 developed by Cortex Pharmaceuticals has been shown to reverse the biological and behavioral effects of sleep deprivation. Tests performed on monkeys that were subjected to 30-36 hours of sleep deprivation revealed an average test performance accuracy drop to 63 percent, but that performance was restored to 84 percent after administering CX717. During normal alert conditions, performance accuracy of the animals was improved from an average of 75 percent to 90 percent after an injection of CX717. It is also believed the drug may help prevent or restore memory loss in Alzheimer's patients."

Comments

Don't ignore the signals.

[Poromenos1]

I don't like this. Sleep deprivation effects are there for a reason, to signal that you need to sleep. I can understand if people who can't sleep and need to be alert need to use this (e.g. soldiers in combat), but it's not going to be very good for the average person who needs to do some more work. People need to sleep for various reasons (rest, various chemicals get regenerated, etc). It's not a whim of nature.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[Chicane-UK]

Exactly the same sort of post I was going to make.

The body tell us its tired for a reason - it needs good healthy sleep, in order to keep you all in check. People who avoid sleep, people who keep themselves awake with drugs, people who burn the candle at both ends.. they are just setting themselves up for premature death. Just go to sleep!

As Kramer once said in an episode of Seinfeld.. "Well.. I don't argue with the body Jerry. It's an argument you can't win!"

Its a comment I whole heartedly agree with! :)

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[SatanicPuppy]

During the period when I was abusing my body to the limit, I could go three or four days with about 8 hours of sleep. And then I'd crash and LOSE A DAY...i.e. pass out around 3pm on friday and wake up sunday morning at 4:00am. I remember falling asleep in my car, right in front of my apartment, because I was too tired to walk up the stairs.

Passed out once, and my roomate had 5 guys over working on a CS project and it didn't wake me up until 10:30 at night. They'd been there since about 11:00 and I'd been there, asleep, since the night before. And when I say "roommate" I mean we shared a ROOM. I scared the hell out of him when I woke up because they'd thought the big bump in my bed was just a continuation of all the crap piled on top of it. I got up, ate dinner, went right back to sleep.

I'm still paying for that crap, ten years later. It's totally not worth it.

Heart attack in a pill

[bigwavejas]

Sleep is critical for muscles/ organs to rebuild themselves. If I were Cortex I'd be a bit hesitant to release this drug to the public, without the strictest prescription. Lest they end up like Merck with Vioxx

Slashdot

[saskboy]

If I stopped reading slashdot until 12:00AM that would help with my sleep deprivation, without the use of drugs.

I have a feeling most other computer users would find the same benefits from turning off their computers at 10:00PM.

In the future...

[lxs]

...we'll all be working 36 hour shifts.

Is the trademarked name going to be

[joeflies]

Methamphetamine?

Soon to follow: beverages

[I_am_Rambi]

Watch, coffee and pop will soon have versions of with this drug and without this drug. Soon the human race will become dependant on this just as we are on caffinee.

Interesting...

[ovit]

I read somewhere that a significant biologic reason for sleep was simply that animals who laid down in a dark place for half the time had an evolutionary advantage over thos who didn't (it's about 50% harder to be eaten by a predator if 50% of your time your asleep)...

Rather than do the usual slashdot "Science is EViL" thing, why not really think about the potential here...

Yes, they will probably discover that over use of this has some serious side effect, but all that means is that it shouldn't be over used... It does not mean that we all need to run an hide...

For being a site full of geeks this place is remarkably anti science sometimes...

Re:Interesting...

[An Onerous Coward]

You read wrong. The problem is, there is a direct, linear correlation between body size and amount of time spent sleeping, that has nothing to do with whether one is predator or prey. For example, mice spend the vast majority of their time asleep, while cats spend a good 75% of their time asleep. When you get up to human sized creatures, you expect to see them spend about a third of their life asleep. Elephants sleep about four hours a night. What they do with all those long, dark hours is anybody's guess.

The question of why we sleep is still a bit of a mystery to me, but if you're simply looking at it as "defense from predators", you're going to fundamentally misunderstand the phenomenon.

Misleading summary, article

[Red Flayer]

Revision: "reverse [some of] the biological and behavioral effects of sleep deprivation"

This drug also increased test performance in the control group. The increase in test performance was slightly more pronounced in the sleep-deprived group.

Caffeine would likely show similar results, as would nasal decongestants and stimulant diet pills (both of which are amphetamines).

Hell, for that matter, I bet crystal meth, in low doses, would produce the same effect.

Meh, wake me up when the real fix for sleep deprivation is discovered... oh, wait...

Re:Coming soon...

[tumanov]

I think we should all be focusing on being able to work better instead of being able to work longer. I've been doing a lot of introspective thinking about how much I work vs. how much actually gets done. And really its only the last 4 hours before a deadline that the work gets done - regardless of how many all-nighters were pulled.

So while getting read of sleep deprivation effects might be nice, I really just need a drug that'll push me into the last-mile mindset and get me to actually do the amazing work that gets done under pressure. Caffeine and nicotine just don't cut it anymore.

Heck, like one of the replies to your post mentions, the C in this drug could stand for cocaine and it'd probably have the same effect if it WAS just cocaine, except maybe with the downside of addiction.

Re:Coming soon...

[h4rm0ny]

Heck, like one of the replies to your post mentions, the C in this drug could stand for cocaine and it'd probably have the same effect if it WAS just cocaine, except maybe with the downside of addiction.

Except that no-body holds the patent on cocaine so its illegal.

But regarding addiction, at least you can make an argument with cocaine against using it. But this - I can see bosses coming along and expecting employees to just pop one of these in order to pull off a 48 hour overtime to meet a deadline. And you know that some idiot employees will be escalating the standards of company loyalty by using these.

Honestly, we shouldn't be looking at ways of improving our capacity to work. We not only devote more time to work than our ancestors, but 90% of us aren't even working for ourselves. We have modern technology, farming techniques, transport and communication. One person does what would take a hundred a century ago and our hours are going up?

We don't need a pill to help us work harder, we just need to adjust our expectations.

Nothing new

[Frangible]

Amphetamines have been around for what, 100 years or so? Dextroamphetamine is the Air Force's "go pill" and is quite effective at keeping someone alert when they should be sleeping.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd= Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=1462046 8&query_hl=4

While they argue that this drug is different because of possibly less abuse potential (yet have no data to back that assertation up with, such as self-reinforcing studies in animals), I think the real reason is because pharmaceutical patents only last 20 years. As far as abuse potential goes, addiction is usually characterized by increased dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, of which amphetamine activates indirectly; I have seen no evidence as to whether or not CX717 will indirectly raise dopamine levels in that region of the brain as well.

They may claim they're not stimulants, but the action is that of binding to receptors and releasing a neurotransmitter called glutamate. Is that really so different than stimulants binding to a receptor and releasing norepinephrine, another neurotransmitter?

From the journal article, revealed increased activity in prefrontal cortex, dorsal striatum, and medial temporal lobe (including hippocampus) that was significantly enhanced over normal alert conditions following administration of CX717. You would see similar increases in brain activity following the administration of amphetamine as well.

Furthermore, high levels of glutamate have neurotoxic properties: In excess, glutamate causes neuronal damage and eventual cell death, particularly when NMDA receptors are activated.

Somehow though, I think the combination of a pharmaceutical company making $2.00 in profit per pill combined with possibly less of an abuse potential or political incorrectness of usage will make this drug preferred in spite of whatever risks it carries.

Of course, maybe I'm just bitter and skeptical in my old age.

Why in the world would you say that?

[QMO]

"Except that no-body holds the patent on cocaine so its illegal."

I can't believe that reasoning.

First: Asprin and Alcohol aren't patented, and aren't illegal.

Second: Lots of patented drugs are VERY illegal. (It takes a lot of money, time, red tape, and testing to get a new patented drug to the point where it is even legal to test on people.)

But then you say:
"We don't need a pill to help us work harder, we just need to adjust our expectations."

Which I totally agree with.

Re:Why in the world would you say that?

[h4rm0ny]

That the other is prescription drug controlled by medical experts who have the necessary knowledge about it's effects and dosage, and the other is substance of unsure purity and blending sold by random crooks with no medical background whatsoever?

I agree. But the downside has relatively little to do with the drug itself and rather its legality. But that was your point too, so perhaps we're just agreeing with each other loudly. :)

Regarding this discrepancy between the two drugs' similarity yet their differing legal status, I think it happened something like this:

In the early sixties, Speed was outlawed and the police cracked down on it. This was accompanied by all the usual propaganda and hoo-ha, demonising Speed as a terrible evil. Later however, drug companies saw an opportunity to make money from speed but you can't suddenly turn round and say "You know that terrible stuff that will destroy your children, well it's okay if we give it to them." People would smell a rat.

So something that has a very similar effect is patented, marketed and in comes the money. But you know, Ritalin is spelt differently to Speed, so nobody panics about their children being fed it.

I normally avoid using any personal information in a discussion on /., anecdotal evidence and all that, but it might be interesting to know that I personally don't smoke, drink alcohol or drink coffee, tea, anything fizzy or containing aspartame or akasulfame-k. As far as I'm concerned, speed, ritalin, cocaine or prozac - all look pretty dodgy to me. But I do like to discuss things openly, and the pharmaceutical industry doesn't like that game at all.

My £0.02.

-H.

Re:Coming soon...

[over_exposed]

Taking it to stay competitive is a far cry from being mandatory. Here's a stretch: Steroids enhance athletic ability and many athletes take them to stay competitive "Because taht guy did it and the only way to beat him is to take them too."

What I see happening is substances like this coming out and then people will abuse them. They will become addicted to them. Maybe not physically, but psychologically. "I can't be the best at my job if I don't take these so bottoms up!" As soon as abuse is spotted, public outcry will commence, support groups will spring up and tehy will become as popular as caffeine pills and speed. Not to say that caffeine pills aren't a problem, but they aren't mandatory by any employer and any company that doesn't want a lawsuit will not recommend or even offer them to their employees.

Your ideas have some merit to them and the "Look, why don't you just take one of these? You're letting us down." situation will probably occur, but it won't be at the company level. It will strictly be from employee to employee, peer to peer. Does your company have NoDoz (tm) in the break room? I doubt it.

Lastly, you "I crashed my car because they wouldn't sell me this at the garage and I fell asleep at the wheel." situation is not too likely in my mind. I can complain that my doctor didn't give me an adrenaline shot so I couldn't lift the car off of my wife when we got into a wreck. Ok, bad example, but anywho. I don't think you'll ever be able to register a justifiable complaint against someone because they didn't provide you with performance enhancing (because that's essentially what this is) drugs in any situation. You can complain on a medical basis (ie. my doctor wouldn't give me enough insulin and I went into a diabetic coma) but not on a supplemental basis.

Re:Coming soon...

[ifwm]

Ritalin/Adderall (your misspelling has me wondering how credible your knowledge is) are simialr to methamphetamine, but what does that have to do with anything? Similar chemicals can behave in VASTLY different ways.

They ARE NOT however, even remotely similar to cocaine, and by making such a statement, you show how little understanding you have of the chemistry involved.