Can a bad night’s sleep cost you brain cells?

If you’ve ever woken up after a poor night’s sleep and felt dreadful the next day, it could be because you’ve lost a few brain cells.

A study at the Univerity of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has shown that mice who failed to get enough sleep over a prolonged period of time lost up to 25% of their brain cells.

The conditions the mice were exposed to, only getting four to five hours of sleep a night, represented the sleeping patterns of shift workers.

More tests need to be done to find out whether humans would suffer the same level of brain cell loss as the mice, but the study raises interesting questions about the importance of how much sleep we get.