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  • Essay / Article Review: How Sleep Quality Affects the Brain

    The purpose of the research done in this article was to analyze how sleep quality affects the brain. The research question was whether sleep quality is associated with cortical and hippocampal volumes as well as measures of brain atrophy. It has been hypothesized that poor sleep quality is associated with decreased volume while increasing atrophy of the orbitofrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original trial To test the hypothesis, an MRI scan was administered to participants between 2006 and 2009. Then, a second MRI scan was administered between 2011 and 2012. Finally, a sleep quality assessment was tested between 2012 and 2013 The same scanner and MRI process remained the same throughout this study. The MRI images were processed individually and then longitudinally. The Sleep Quality Assessment was a questionnaire used to assess the seven domains of sleep quality. The researchers also analyzed other factors such as physical activity, BMI and blood pressure. The factors were measured when participants presented for the second MRI using appropriate questionnaires and tests. At T2, cross-sectional cortical analysis was performed at each brain vertex as the dependent variable. The PSQI score from the sleep analysis was used as an independent variable. Similarly, longitudinal cortical analysis used a general linear model to study volume change between T2 and T1. Volume change measured at each cortex was the dependent variable with PSQI score as the independent variable. The influence of outliers and other possible effects such as physical activity and BMI were also considered. All of this data was then used to determine which aspects of sleep most closely matched the results. The results of this research determined that poor sleep quality was linked to reduced volume in the superior frontal cortex. Additionally, poor sleep quality was associated with increased atrophy of the brain's frontal, parietal, and occipital lobes. It was also determined that other factors such as physical activity, BMI and blood pressure were not associated with the sleep analysis score, or PSQI. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that poor sleep quality is linked to decreased volume while increasing atrophy of the orbitofrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex. The goal of the CNN article was to summarize the research conducted on how poor sleep affects the brain. They explained that the study was tested with two MRI scans and a questionnaire about participants' sleep habits. The data they concluded indicated that people with poor sleep habits had a faster decline in brain volume. It was also concluded that people over sixty showed these tendencies the most. The aim of the article was to highlight that poor sleep habits can lead to brain disorders leading to memory loss, thereby shrinking our brains. At the end of the article, they chose three statements from the original article. These three statements suggest that more testing needs to be done and that many questions remain to be answered. The author of the popular news article uses causal language when he claims that lack of sleep affects the size of our brains. Causal conclusions cannot be drawn from.