Sleep and the Gut

Sleep is critical to our survival and our very existence: Evidence suggests that even the earliest animals entered sleeplike states. Most efforts to understand the importance of sleep, however, focus primarily on the brain and sleep’s role in regulating memory and cognition.

In this lecture, Dragana Rogulja will present her lab’s work studying the vital functions of sleep throughout the body. She and her colleagues discovered that sleep deprivation causes oxidative stress that eventually results in death. The organ most critically injured by this process, they found, is the gut. In another study, they found that the gut can, in turn, regulate sleep, particularly the depth of sleep. These discoveries suggest a bidirectional relationship between sleep and the gut. She will also touch on the connections between poor sleep, gut health and autism spectrum disorders.