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

Oh boy

[bogie]

The military is going to love this.

Expect Cortex's IP to be bought the us mil any second now.

Of course the real fun will be when they discover that taking this for months and sleeping 1 hour a night, you go insane and think your a humming bee.

Re:Oh boy

[MmmmAqua]

I have never met anyone in the Army who had any trouble falling asleep any time, anywhere. My experience is limited to cavalry and infantry, though, so maybe that's just something about combat arms troops. Over the course of a year in Baghdad, I was able to fall asleep in some surprising situations.

Of course, when going on extended missions, we also had the option of asking the platoon medics for stimulants. I don't remember what the name of the drug was, but one little white pill kept you up and alert for about two days. You did crash pretty hard after that. Anyway, while there may be some interest in the military for this drug, its use won't be anywhere near as prevalent as you seem to think. The Army likes its combat units to be operationally ready all the time, but also keeps mission durations and objectives as tight as possible to minimize battle fatigue and risk of combat losses. Sometimes you can't avoid a mission that lasts for a week, and in those (relatively rare - I only remember doing maybe a dozen of those two-day-plus missions over a year) situations, a drug to mitigate sleep-dep would be a godsend.

Sometimes it's good to forget.

[PIPBoy3000]

I was just thinking this morning as I punched in the old door combination for the hundredth time that it would be nice if that memory vanished a bit more quickly.

Your brain already does a pretty good job at figuring out what memories should be stored strongly and which ones should be left to fade away. It's almost certainly possible to override that mechanism, but you'll probably end up with incredibly vivid memories of things that aren't very relevant.

Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[aduzik]

As someone who suffers from chronic insomnia -- and yeah, I've gone through all the medical nonsense for them to tell me there's nothing wrong with me physically or emotionally -- having a drug to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation sounds like a godsend. For me, all the sleep deprivation effects in the world can't help me fall asleep. For example, I finally fell asleep at about 5:30 this morning and had to get up about an hour and a half later for work.

Some of us are jealous of the relative ease with which the rest of you fall asleep. (The absolute worst is sharing a hotel room after a long trip, where your traveling companion falls asleep right away, but you don't fall asleep for hours) I'd be happy to at least feel as awake as most people seem. The only time I feel that way is when I can sleep in on the weekends. It's mostly just depressing that I can't be that alert the rest of the week -- you know, when it matters most.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[cecille]

ha ha...no kidding...my last semester of school we had a huge project where we were working in a lab we could only use at night. Classes, of course, were still during the day, so sleep was something like 9:00-11:00 MWF and 10:30-1:30 TTH. Not a great schedule, but what can you do. Well, about 4 weeks into this (just before exams) I left the lab one morning feeling quite ill. Woke up 4 hours later on the floor of my bathroom. Don't even remember getting home, but from what my friends tell me I was talking about a chipmunk and kept swerving the car. From that point on we decided that it might be good to get a little sleep. Sure enough, 8 hours of solid sleep later I felt like a million. At that point, I think I would have taken something like this gladly, but really...if you're getting that broken, suppressing the symptoms CAN'T be a good idea.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[JabberWokky]

(Disclaimer: Drugs are useful. My brother is in the hospital right now, and was likely going to die on Saturday, but is hopefully going to be moved out of the cardiac ICU soon. His life was saved by modern drugs.)

My favorite oddball drugs that are heavily advertised are the "prevents that uncomfortable full feeling" and "cures fullness".

We literally live in a time when being full is considered a major problem worthy of heavy advertising to a large chunk of the human population. Consider the fact that the majority of human history is full of people fighting not to starve to death... and now we're worried about being uncomfortably full.

You can look at that with either bitter sarcasm or wonder at the accomplishments of humanity -- I rotate back and forth. But either way, it's durn funny.

--
Evan

Re:Slashdot

[JorDan Clock]

It worked for me.

I went for a week where I didn't allow myself to stay on the computer later than 10:00PM because of a severely distorted sleeping schedule, and by the end of the week, I had my schedule back to a very sane 11PM-8AM (I'm a teenager, so that might even be a little on the light side compared to some others, haha.) and I felt considerably more alert, as well as just feeling more healthy.

I doubt this drug will become a sleep replacement for the average man, but I can see it being used to help at critical times, such as having an emergency amount of it on-board a space shuttle in the event of a prolonged emergency where maximum alertness is necesary or similar scenarios.

I wouldn't mind having a few doses of this, though, for LAN parties. While everyone else is struggling to drag their mouse across their mousepad, I'll still be zipping around, even long after the Bawls run out.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[Mondoz]

"The body tell us its tired for a reason - it needs good healthy sleep, in order to keep you all in check."

I've often thought about why we still have certain primal signals.
Pain from obvious sources, for instance.

I skinned my knee. I know I skinned my knee. I can see it. I'm looking right at it. I just cleaned the darn thing. Yet it still smarts like hell.

Why can't I turn off the darn pain receptors?
Why, as a (okay, this next bit is questionable, but just go with it) intelligent being can't I just acknowledge those signals, and snooze them or something?
I know. It hurts. Leave me alone until I get to the hospital.
I know, I'm exhausted. Let me get to a bed without falling over.
I know, I get the picture, send the right chemicals to the right places until I get the right treatment, but until then, just leave me alone!

My knee tells me it hurts for a reason: it needs attention so it won't get infection.
Broken bones hurt so they will get mended.
Neither one know they've been fixed once they've been tended to, so they continue to complain.

"The body tell us its tired for a reason - it needs good healthy sleep, in order to keep you all in check."

If this drug can keep us from actually needing to sleep, then it's just like my knee. I don't really need to sleep, but nobody's actually informed my body yet.

Re:In the future...

[Crag]

If I could work one 40 hour shift a week, and have the rest of the week off, I'd be thrilled. Even more so if science finds a way to reduce my weekly sleep time without negative health consequences.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[Council]

People need to sleep for various reasons (rest, various chemicals get regenerated, etc).

From what I understand, there's not a clear consensus on why we need sleep. I mean, it does a number of things, and we've figured many of them out, but as far as biology goes none of them seems to be a deal-breaker. I can easily imagine a large mammal that just walks around eating and doing stuff all day. Why is it that we spend a third of our lives in this comatose state?

I mean, it's pretty much taken for granted, but when I stop to think about it, it seems pretty damn weird. Imagine an alien that shows up and we say "we need to go, gotta sleep" and they say "why?" and we say "uhhhh, to recharge." "I thought you ate food for energy." "yeah, it's for . . . maintanence?" "what kind?" "not sure. it's just this powerful compulsion." "what are the leading theories? you mean you aren't even sure why you do this every night?" "zzzzzzz."

Just something interesting that I've given a lot of thought to, especially since I started working unpredicatble night shifts. I wonder if every major mammal needs sleep because we evolved with a light/dark cycle, or if it's just something that it's impossible to construct a complex brain without.

Re:Don't ignore the signals.

[Sycraft-fu]

It may simply be essential for the body to rest, peridocly. When you sleep you don't move very much, of course, your heart rate, breating and such go way down. Your organs fall in to a low activity state, you use less energy, etc.

Well it may be as simple as that if you go all the time, things start to wear out. There is some justification for this in injuries. If you keep working the thing that is injured, it won't heal, if however you allow it to rest, your body will fix itself. Well some things, like our heart, can't ever really rest as in do nothing, so perhaps sleep is the next best thing, a perodic low state where essential organs can rest.

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing the fact that herbivores sleep a lot less than carnivores or omnivores, simply because they need longer feeding hours to maintain an adequate nutritional intake.

The larger mammals tend to be herbivores simply because carnivores require a huge prey population for a stable population (eg. to support a pack of 20 breeding wolves, you might require a group of 200 breeding caribou). Once large carnivores get over a certain size they couldn't effectively form a stable breeding population because they would require a huge stable prey population to sustain them. This counts against them in terms of evolutionary success.

Because of this quirk, our larger mammals are almost invariably herbivores, and this complicates the issue of sleep.

To get a clearer idea, it would be better to separate herbivores from carnivores/omnivores, and plot body size versus sleep requirements for both.
It could be that the trend still holds, and the analysis has probably already been done, but you should be careful not to forget that there are many other complicating factors which influence sleep patterns, including predator patterns, environment and feeding types :)