Familial natural short sleep mutations reduce Alzheimer pathology in mice

"Elite sleep genes allow lucky few to get full night's sleep in just 4 hours" I could use some of these genes! :-) 

The age of human genome editing to improve our health etc. is coming! Nature had billions of years, humans can do it faster and better.

In a previous blog post, I recommended to remove the annoying sneezing gene forever!

"... People who are able to function fully on four to six hours of sleep have what scientists call Familial Natural Short Sleep (FNSS). [researcher] has been studying people with FNSS for over a decade. Previous studies showed that FNSS runs in the family. Five genes have been identified thus far linked to FNSS. ...
research also suggests that people with FNSS, which he calls ‘elite sleepers’, have above-average psychological resilience and resistance to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. ..."

From the abstract:

"Although numerous studies have demonstrated that poor sleep increases the development of AD, direct evidence elucidating the benefits of good sleep on the AD pathogenesis is lacking. Familial Natural Short Sleepers (FNSS) are genetically wired to have lifelong reduction in nightly sleep duration without evident consequence on cognitive demise, implying that they may have better sleep quality. Here we investigated two FNSS mutations, DEC2-P384R and Npsr1-Y206H, on the development of tau and amyloid pathology in AD-like mouse models. We found that the development of tau pathology is attenuated in the hippocampus of tau mice carrying FNSS mutations. We also found that DEC2-P384R;5XFAD and female Npsr1-Y206H;5XFAD mice exhibit significantly less amyloid plaques than control mice at 6 months of age. Together, these results reveal that these two FNSS alleles are strong genetic modifiers of AD pathology and may confer resilience to the progression of tau pathology and amyloid plaque formation in neurodegeneration."

Elite sleep genes allow lucky few to get full night's sleep in just 4 hours These genes could be targeted by drugs that improve the quality of sleep for all.

Familial natural short sleep mutations reduce Alzheimer pathology in mice