Soldiers who do not get enough sleep are less likely to perform well on the battlefield, according to a new study conducted jointly by the Army Research Laboratory and the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.
The results of the team’s study were published in Nature Communications magazine.
In a key finding, the team determined that people who have to sleep during daylight hours experience adverse effects on their glymphatic system – the brain’s mechanism that retains necessary information and discards waste.
Scientific understanding of the glymphatic system’s molecular and fluid dynamics, and how they are regulated by the sleep-wake cycle, are essential to understanding the effects of regular and irregular sleep, they concluded.
“This knowledge is crucial to developing future countermeasures that offset the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation and addresses future multi-domain military operation requirements for soldiers to sustain performance over longer periods without the ability to rest,” wrote Dr. Frederick Gregory, program manager for neurophysiology of cognition initiative at the Army Research Laboratory.
The glymphatic system is a fairly new discovery, having been identified by a laboratory at the University of Rochester in 2012. In simplistic terms, scientists describe it as a network that works in conjunction with blood circulation by pumping fluid through the brain during sleep. The fluid carries away waste and toxic proteins as it moves through brain tissue.
The research also shows that the glymphatic system also plays a role in regulating blood pressure, heart rate, circadian timing and depth of sleep. It showed that people who rely on naps to catch up on sleep are at greater risk of sustaining neurological disorders – including Alzheimer’s and dementia – than those who sleep at regular hours during the night.
