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Your brain starts to eat itself if it hasn’t had enough sleep, according to a new study. Researchers studied lab mice
and discovered that ‘clean-up’ cells were more active in their brains when they were sleep-deprived.
The cells act like mini Hoovers in the brain, sweeping up cells as the brain’s connections become weak and break apart.
Sleeping for less than six hours per night is associated with a higher risk of death in people with metabolic syndrome – a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure.
Researchers said the effect was particularly strong in those with elevated blood pressure or poor glucose metabolism.
People with a common cluster of risk factors for heart disease and diabetes were around twice as likely to die of heart disease or stroke as people without the same set of risk factors if they failed to get more than six hours of sleep, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
The researchers randomly selected 1,344 adults with an average age of 49 who agreed to spend one night in a sleep laboratory.
Based on their test results, 39.2 per cent of the participants were found to have at least three of the risk factors, that when clustered together are known as the metabolic syndrome.