It’s no joke: a sleepless night would age our brain by a year or two

We’ve all had, at least once in our lives, a time when sleep was harder to come by. But what happens to the brain when we don’t sleep, a problem that currently affects 15 to 20% of French people according to Inserm? According to a study conducted by the Sleep Foundation and broadcast by the National Library of Medicine, Sleeping through the night could be the cause of premature aging of the brain.

To reach this conclusion, researchers at the University of Zurich compared the MRI scans of 134 healthy volunteers aged between 19 and 39 years. The average age is 25.3 years. A total of 42 women and 92 men with different sleeping conditions participated in the game. And those who were deprived of sleep for 24 hours consistently showed a year or two of brain aging compared with the subjects who slept well.

A cerebrospinal fluid disorder

What causes the brain to age prematurely when a person sleeps through the night is an interruption in the circulation of cerebrospinal fluid. A liquid that helps cleanse the brain of toxins. But that is not all! A another study conducted by Italian researchers and published in the Neuroscience Journal certifies it lack of sleep can also cause disturbances in cell organization. The latter, which should “clean” the brain during sleep, would attack the synapses, these areas of contact between neurons that circulate information. Worrying.

A phenomenon that can be solved

Luckily, the observations made by scientists of the aging of the brain during a sleepless night are reversible thanks to recovery sleep. These guarantee it “after a night of restful sleep, brain age was no different from baseline”. So don’t panic if you have the occasional sleepless night. You just need to get a good sleep the next day for your brain to regenerate. Reassured?

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