In a new study, Stanford researchers describe a treatable medical condition which causes people to commit violent sexual acts in their sleep.
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Mar
27
2002
Stanford sleep experts treat violent sleep sex
Researchers studying three families with the same unusual sleep pattern have uncovered the first hereditary sleep disorder in humans caused by a single gene. Neurologist Christopher Jones and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Louis Ptácek, both at the University of Utah, are now searching for the gene that causes the disorder known as familial advanced sleep phase syndrome (FASPS).
Ptácek and his colleagues concluded that a single gene was responsible for FASPS by studying how the condition was passed along from one generation to the next within the affected families. In this case, inheritance seemed to follow the same simple pattern seen with other single gene traits, such as eye color.
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Researchers who had bred a group of mice in hopes of learning more about a brain hormone that stimulates appetite got a bit of a surprise when they saw that the rodents would suddenly collapse and fall fast asleep with no provocation. As a result, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Masashi Yanagisawa and colleagues at the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas have an exciting new lead into the genesis of sleep and the origins of narcolepsy, a severe sleep disorder in humans.
In 1998, Yanagisawa discovered the orexins, small brain proteins and their receptors that regulate feeding behavior in mice. To probe the role that orexins play in regulating appetite, Yanagisawa and his colleagues developed a strain of knockout mice whose orexin genes do not function properly.
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