38 min listen
Journal Club: Sleeping Under the Star-Shaped Cells
FromRaising Health
ratings:
Length:
26 minutes
Released:
May 4, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
Neuroscientists have long been trying to determine what happens in the brain during sleep, but to date, they have overlooked a key player: astrocytes. These star-shaped cells were once thought to be the glue that held the brain together, but we are now beginning to appreciate their importance in a variety of brain functions. In this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Kira Poskanzer, Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, about her group's work showing that neurons are only one piece of the larger sleep puzzle. The conversation covers the complexity of sleep, how astrocytes control two key attributes of sleep (depth and duration), the technology and methods employed to uncover this novel mode of regulation, and how appreciating the role of astrocytes in governing sleep could lead to new insights into neuropsychiatric conditions and how to treat them. The article at the center of today's episode is: “Cortical astrocytes independently regulate sleep depth and duration via separate GPCR pathways” by Trisha V Vaidyanathan, Max Collard, Sae Yokoyama, Michael E Reitman, and Kira E Poskanzer, published in eLife.
Released:
May 4, 2021
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
The Story of Schizophrenia: Descriptions of the mental illness we today call schizophrenia are as old as humankind itself. And more than likely, we are are all familiar with this disease in some way, as it touches 1% of us—millions of lives—and of course, their families. In this episode, we dive into the remarkable story of one such American family, the Galvins: Mimi, Don, and their 12 children, 6 of whom were afflicted with schizophrenia. In his book, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, Robert Kolker follows the Galvins from the 1950s to today—through, he writes, “the eras of institutionalization and shock therapy, the debates between psycho-therapy versus medication, the needle-in-a-haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about the cause and origin of the illness itself.” Because of that, this is really more than just a portrait of one family; it’s a portrait of how we have struggled over the last decades to understa by Raising Health