Sleep Deprivation: The Current Scene

It wasn't all that long ago that Americans, on average, slept nine hours a night. Today, we average about seven-- two hours less. But according to sleep researchers, that doesn't mean we need two hours less.

On average, humans need the full eight hours.

David Dinges is an expert on sleep disorders at the University of Pennsylvania.

One might fairly ask, what is the purpose of all that time offline from your outside world?

The answer is no one's really sure. After centuries of research and inquiry, the function of sleep remains a biological enigma. We spend a third of our lives asleep. We know we need it, but we don't know why.

Is it for the mind or for the body? And what happens when we try to do away with it all together?

Whenever you chronically reduce sleep, even in small amounts, and make people live on seven or six or five or four hours of sleep a night, you get these escalating impairments. The brain becomes unstable during wakefulness. Attention wanes. You can't remember things as well.

The National Sleep Foundation data show us that about 42% of American adults are not getting the sleep that they say they need.

--that we place onto your head.

All those sleepless Americans are jamming sleep disorder clinics across the country, like this one at St Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in New York City.

Gary Zammit is the director. There are more than 80 different sleep disorders currently identified. One of the most common sleep disorders i insomnia. Occasional insomnia effects somewhere between 36% and 56% of American adults.

The biggest problem doctors face in treating the legion of sleepless is getting people to regard being tired or having trouble sleeping as a serious medical condition.

One of the myths about sleep disorders is that you can somehow survive with a sleep disorder and it won't have any significant impact on your life.

And at the University of Chicago, Eve Van Cauter is gathering scientific evidence that may prove lack of sleep affects our bodies as well as our minds.

We are curtailing our sleep dramatically. And we are also seeing, now, an epidemic of both obesity and diabetes. And is there any relationship between the two?

In a recent study reported in The Lancet, Van Cauter looked at the effects of limited sleep on a group of healthy young men.

After four hours of sleep per night for six days, they were essentially in a prediabetic state. For me, it was really an alarm bell.

Inadequate sleep has also been linked to hypertension and a weakened immune system. And on top of all that, according to the University of Pennsylvania's David Dinges, it's just plain dangerous.

There is this relentless push in industrialized societies-- and the United States certainly leads the world in it-- to have more people awake more of the time.

As a result, another area of scientific inquiry in the sleep world is how to keep people awake. And that's where a new drug called modafinil comes in.

We don't know exactly how it works.

Dr. Paul Blake is coordinating clinical studies of the drug for Cephalon, the company that makes it.

It seems to be very localized at the size of the brain where it works, whereas other traditional stimulants seem to have a more general action.

Modafinil works only on specific neurotransmitters in the brain, fooling the brain into a state of wakefulness at any hour, without any of the nasty side effects of older amphetamines, like jitteriness, increased pulse, and heart rate. Already approved by the FDA to treat the sleep disorder narcolepsy, in the hope is that one day modafinil could be used by shift workers who need to fool their body clocks just to do their job.

Modafinil has also caught the attention of the United States military. At the US Army Aeromedical Research Center at Fort Rucker, Alabama, John Caldwell is studying the effects of modafinil on Blackhawk helicopter pilots, who often have to fly long missions with no sleep.

While they were on the drug, then their behavior was almost at the same level as it was when they were well rested, despite the fact that they had been awake for 24, 30, 35 hours.

But what if we didn't need to sleep at all, or, like our mammal cousins, the killer whales, we were able to sleep with one half of our brain at a time? At Sea World in San Diego, UCLA researcher Oleg Lyamin is studying the sleep patterns of Nakai, the baby killer whale, and his mother, Kasatka.

They'll sleep with the right brain, and then they'll sleep with the left side of the brand. And they never sleep with both sides at the same time.

Jerry Siegel oversees Oleg Lyamin's work.

If we can understand how this unusual pattern of sleep is regulated, we might better understand disorders of sleep control in humans.

What human mother wouldn't love to get a good night's sleep, while at the same time keeping one watchful eye on her baby, up playing in the middle of the night?