Coffee has long been the stopgap after a bad night’s sleep. It provides the temporary energy boost one needs to pretend like they aren’t operating at roughly half capacity. Of course, coffee is no substitute for sleep and previous studies have shown its effects to that end are temporary at best.
But this is all post-bad sleep coffee. And new research finds that regular coffee consumption leading up to instances of sleep deprivation may actually work to counter its effects.
As reported by Inc, the new study is the work of researchers at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and was recently published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. For it, they examined how sleep deprivation and caffeine impact the CA2 region of the hippocampus, the part of the brain crucial for processing social memory. Social memory is a shared remembrance of the past within a certain group or community and it used by members of that group to distinguish others within it.
For the study, researchers “induced five hours of sleep deprivation” in laboratory mice. As anticipated, sleep deprivation disrupted the mice’s ability to recognize another mouse they had met before. When the researchers measured synaptic plasticity, they discovered a weakened communication between neurons and the CA2 region, which reduced the capacity to form new social memories.
But when mice were given a caffeine water solution for seven days before the induced sleep deprivation, plasticity in the CA2 and synaptic communication returned to normal levels. Not only were social memory deficits reversed, but researchers noticed that caffeine affected only specific neural pathways instead of increasing all neural activity in the brain. Meaning, “the control group… did not exhibit signs of overstimulation despite caffeine exposure.”
“Sleep deprivation does not just make you tired. It selectively disrupts important memory circuits,” states lead author Dr. Lik-Wei Wong. “We found that caffeine can reverse these disruptions at both the molecular and behavioral levels. Its ability to do so suggests that caffeine’s benefits may extend beyond simply helping us stay awake.”
Though mice and humans are biologically similar, further tests will need to be performed to determine if similar effects take place in humans. Nonetheless, the best bandaid for a night of bad sleep may not be the next morning’s coffee. It may be the ones from the week before.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
