Immune Response Affects Memory and Causes Sleep Deprivation

New research has found that it is not the illness but the immune response that causes sleep deprivation and affects memory.

It is common for insomnia to occur during sickness due to the association between brain and immune system. But researchers at the University of Leicester found that it is the body's fight against the illness and not the illness itself that causes insomnia.  This new study was conducted on flies where the researchers observed that insomnia that occurs due to sickness is quite common.

Biologist Dr Eamonn Mallon said, "Think about when you are sick. Your sleep is disturbed and you're generally not feeling at your sharpest. Previously work has been carried out showing that being infected leads to exactly these behaviors in fruit flies..."

In the current study, researchers reveal how the immune system itself has the potential to trigger sleep and memory related problems.  The researchers artificially activated the immune system in flies. Doing so helped them lower the sleep duration as well as alter the performance in a memory test,

"This is an interesting result as these connections between the brain and the immune system have come to the fore recently in medicine. It seems to be because the two systems speak the same chemical language and often cross-talk. Having a model of this in the fly, one of the main systems used in genetic research will be a boost to the field," Mallon explained.

This finding is crucial as it highlights the association between immune response, sleep as well as memory.  This link between brain and immune system is now being studied in humans. 

This finding was documented in the PeerJ.