Alterations in plasma metabolites during acute sleep deprivation.

The battles with sleep are well known to neurosurgeons especially during the training years. The feeling of falling and quickly jerking awake, bumping your head to the assistant scope of the microscope may sometimes be inevitable especially while assisting a case if you are awake for 24 hours. Sleep deprivation, inadequate quality of sleep, and disruptions to the sleep-wake cycle have consequences on how we function in the daytime. A sleepy and fatigued person suffers from impaired judgment and decreased handto-eye coordination, and is more likely to make mistakes and bad decisions. Moreover, sleep restriction and circadian clock disruption are associated with metabolic disorders including obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes and cardiovascular disease (1). An interesting study by Davies et al. in the July 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal represents an important contribution to metabolic profiling during sleep and acute total sleep deprivation conditions in humans (2).