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Anna Sumner craved sleep, and therefore figured she must
need
sleep. She slept more and more from the time she was a teenager until
it interfered with her job as a lawyer, sometimes for days at a time.
After Sumner was diagnosed with "hypersomnolence," neurologist David Rye
of Emory University and his team looked for the cause, but only got a
clue from the reactions of different drugs that were prescribed to help
her stay awake.
Rye’s group and several others around
the world had also noticed that flumazenil had positive effects on some
people with hypersomnolence. But in the wake of the scandal, Rye put
this line of research on hold. “People got a very bad taste in their
mouths,” he says. The general feeling in the field was “we got duped on
this one, and that’s not going to happen again.”
But when Anna
Sumner came along, Rye’s team at Emory thought it was time to dust off
the old theory. In May 2007, they gave her a spinal tap, an invasive
procedure that collects cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the clear substance
that’s produced in the middle of the brain and flows down the spinal
cord. CSF protects the brain mechanically, by keeping it buoyant, but
it’s also chock-full of proteins and chemicals involved in brain-cell
communication.
Sumner’s CSF was quantifiably abnormal. It
contained a high level of a substance that, like benzodiazepines,
activates the chemical messenger GABA. This neurotransmitter acts as a
shutdown switch in the brain, dialing down consciousness so we can
sleep. Sumner, it seemed, was carrying a bona fide endozepine.
Andy
Jenkins, an anesthesiologist at Emory working on Sumner’s case, joked
with her that if another woman were carrying around the same amount of
GABA-activating sedative, she could practically be operated on. “That’s
what I was walking around with on a daily basis,” Sumner says.
Scandal?
Yes, researchers thought they'd identified an "endozepine," or
naturally-occurring benzodiazepine (drugs used in sleeping pills)
produced by the brain before, in a case from Italy in the 1980s. That
research was exposed as useless, a turn down the wrong alley, and it
only made Rye's newer discovery harder for the scientific community to
swallow. Meanwhile, Sumner and other sufferers of hypersomnolence had to
pay the price for less-than-rigorous research from decades earlier, as
the effective medicine (flumazenil) is not easy to obtain or to
administer. After years of rigorous research, Rye and his team still
cannot fully identify the chemical compound that caused Sumner's
sleepiness, but what they do know has finally been published. Finding
the exact brain chemical that causes hypersomnolence may lead to more
effective sleeping aids, better help for insomnia sufferers, and yes,
big profits for pharmaceutical companies. Read the fascinating story of
Sumner and her malady at
The Last Word On Nothing.
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