They found that heart attacks cause the brain to receive orders to sleep more.

He heart sends some signals to the brain after a heart attack make you want to sleep more and thus speed up the healing process, as this rest can help reduce inflammation.

Scientists at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, one of the world’s leading centers for heart and vascular research and surgery, confirmed this, and their results, published in the journal Nature, show for the first time how the heart and brain communicate with each other through the immune system to improve sleep and recovery after a serious cardiovascular event.

The findings highlight the importance increase sleep after myocardial infarction and suggest that adequate sleep should be a focus of clinical treatment and care after a heart attack, even in intensive care units where sleep is frequently interrupted, along with cardiac rehabilitation.

Researchers They used mouse models for the first time detect this phenomenon; They induced heart attacks in half the mice and performed high-resolution cellular and imaging analyses, and used implantable wireless electroencephalography devices to record electrical signals from their brains and analyze their sleep patterns.

After the heart attack they noticed that slow wave sleep tripleddeep sleep phase, characterized by slow brain waves and decreased muscle activity, the increase in sleep occurred quickly after the heart attack and continued for a week.

When researchers studied the brains of mice that had suffered a stroke, they found that immune cells called “monocytes” They were recruited from the blood to the brain and used a protein called tumor necrosis factor (TNF) to activate neurons in an area of ​​the brain called the thalamus, causing an increase in sleep.

This happened a few hours after the heart attack. None of this happened in mice that did not suffer heart attacks.as the researchers explain in a summary provided by the journal.

The researchers then used sophisticated techniques to manipulate neuronal “TNF” signaling in the thalamus and found that the sleeping brain uses the nervous system to send signals to the heart to reduce cardiac workload, speed healing, and reduce cardiac inflammation after a heart attack.

To better determine the role of increased sleep after a heart attack, researchers also They interrupted the sleep of some mice.

Thus, they confirmed that mice with intermittent sleep after a heart attack represent increased cardiac sympathetic response to stress and inflammationresulting in slower recovery compared to mice with continuous sleep.

The research team also conducted several human studies; First, they studied the brains of patients one or two days after a heart attack and found an increase in the number of monocytes compared to people without heart attacks or other cardiovascular disease, mirroring the results of their studies in mice.

Also analyzed the sleep of more than 80 heart attack patients within four weeks of the cardiovascular event and followed them for two years.

The patients were divided into two groups – good and bad – depending on the quality of their sleep in the four weeks after their heart attack, and the researchers found that Patients who slept poorly in the weeks following a heart attack had a worse prognosis.

Your risk of having another cardiovascular event This was twice as much as those who slept wellThey showed significant improvement in cardiac function, while those who slept poorly showed no or very little improvement.