Impact of Sleep on Gene Activity

They took perfectly healthy individuals and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week.

By the way, six hours of sleep a night for one week

is actually what many people are getting in society.

At least a third of the population seems to be getting

six hours or less during the week. So it was a very sort of ecologically relevant experiment.

And then they measured the change in their gene activity profile

relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hour night of sleep.

And there were two key findings.

First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity.