睡眠の重要性と評価方法
Hello everyone, SCIEN-SPOT is a podcast that shines the spotlight on the latest scientific technology from Japan.
Your host is REN from SCIEN-TALK.
So today's episode is about sleep.
Are you satisfied with your daily sleep?
According to a survey by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare,
1 in 5 adults in Japan reports being unsatisfied with their sleep.
Sleep is incredibly important for our physical and mental health, and chronic sleep
problems are known to increase the risk of developing mental illness, like depletion, as well as lifestyle-related
diseases.
When it comes to assessing sleep, you might have heard of the
Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, or PSQI, and sleep diaries.
These have traditionally been the main methods for assessing sleep,
relying on subjective self-reports. Of course, these methods are very useful and are even used by doctors for
diagnosis and screening.
With the PSQI, you evaluate your sleep quality and duration over the past month across
7 items, and a total score of 6 points or more is considered poor sleep.
However, there was a challenge here,
睡眠不足の客観的評価
because subjective assessments depend on the individual perception,
they can be prone to bias to make it difficult to capture subtle day-to-day changes in sleep status.
For example, you might feel like you slept well even if your body is tired or vice versa.
Unlike sleep disorders, which are medically defined conditions,
objectively assessing poor sleep, a state where you are not getting enough sleep in terms of quantity and quality,
even if it doesn't lead to a formal diagnosis, has been considered difficult until now.
Amidst these challenges, a research team from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, or AIST for short,
has developed a groundbreaking technology that breaks through the barrier of objective sleep assessment.
They've found a way to determine chronic poor sleep just by looking at your saliva.
AIST has previously focused on how psychological stress can trigger conker swords,
and they've been studying the possibility that chronic poor sleep might change the overall environment.
In fact, previous research using mice found that the metabolites in the saliva of sleep-disordered mice were altered,
唾液分析による睡眠調査
and now they've tried to apply this knowledge to humans.
Let's dive into the specifics of their research.
The team evaluated the sleep of 730 Japanese men aged 45 to 60 who were not taking medication or supplements using the PSQI.
From this group, they selected 50 individuals with no sleep problems and 50 individuals with poor sleep,
and collected their saliva samples upon waking.
Next, they thoroughly analyzed these saliva samples using a device called CFDMS,
this is the Foreshot Capillary Electrophoresis Fourier Transform Mass Spectrometer.
This device is excellent for high-sensitivity analysis of water-soluble chemical compounds.
This was done to perform a comprehensive analysis of various metabolites,
chemical substances produced within the body, which is known as metabolome analysis.
You can think of it like reading the chemical fingerprint of your body's complex internal processes.
From the information of the 683 different metabolites detected,
the research team used a machine learning method called Random Forest Analysis.
重要な代謝物の特定
This is an AI-like technique used to determine which components contribute most to identifying the presence or absence of diseases.
It's like sifting through a massive collection of puzzle pieces to find the most crucial 6 key pieces that reveal a specific pattern.
As a result of this analysis, they were able to identify 6 key metabolites
that were important for distinguishing between people with no sleep problems and those with poor sleep.
When they created a discrimination model using these 6 metabolites,
they found that they could identify individuals with poor sleep with an incredibly high accuracy of 86.6%.
This demonstrated that these 6 metabolites are very powerful biomarkers that reflect your sleep quality.
What's more, some of these 6 metabolites are thought to originate from gut or oral bacteria,
suggesting a potential link between these bacteria and poor sleep.
This implies that sleep and our internal microbiome environment might be closely connected,
which makes future research incredibly exciting.
This research represents a significant step toward enabling an objective sleep assessment
唾液を用いた睡眠評価
using a non-invasive and objective method like saliva.
In the future, we can expect the development of reagent kits or simpler devices based on these findings,
which could be used for daily health management and self-care at home, in workplaces or elderly care facilities.
There's also potential for this to be applied to the diagnosis of sleep disorders and to monitor the effectiveness of treatment.
So perhaps in the future, your saliva will tell you about the quality of your sleep.
Okay, that's all for today's SciencePod.
This podcast is broadcasted daily on weekday morning in both Japanese and English.
I'd love for you to listen to the podcast and post your notes and thoughts with the hashtag SciencePod.
See you next time.
