Sleep affects all organs, and the heart too – we know very well that the heart rate slows down during sleep; although it should be clarified that it slows down during slow-wave sleep, and anything can happen to the heart rate during REM sleep. In addition, it is known that those who often wake up at night have a disturbed heart rhythm, and those who generally suffer from insomnia are more likely to have atrial fibrillation. It is also known that those who regularly sleep during the day are less likely to have a heart attack, stroke, etc. But we can see these relationships from medical statistics. Recently, an article was published in Nature, which describes exactly the mechanism that determines the effect of sleep on the heart and is expressed in the interaction of different cells and molecules.
Staff at Mount Sinai Medical Center studied how heart damage affects sleep. Any damage triggers an inflammatory response on the part of the immune system – immune cells, responding to inflammatory signals, remove molecular and cellular debris and stimulate wound healing. (Another thing is that these actions do not always lead to the desired results: inflammation can have a bad effect on healthy cells, and connective tissue closes the wound, which can neither contract nor conduct nerve impulses, etc.) On the other hand, there is evidence that inflammatory molecules affect sleep. In new experiments with mice that had a heart attack, it was possible to see how monocytes rush into the mouse brain – actively crawling immune cells that are among the first to react to all kinds of problems, eat various dangerous substances and stimulate inflammation. Monocytes rushed to the brain at the call of microglial cells, which are usually called immune cells of the brain; microglia actually perform immune work in the brain, but their origin is different from that of ordinary immune cells, and microglial cells do not leave the brain. nkj.ru.
