Amylase to detect sleep

2007/03/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Anatomia/Fisiologia

Scientists are looking for a test to measure people's sleep and find in the School of Medicine at the University of Washington a protein that can be useful to develop the test: amylase, which as your sleep increases accumulates in saliva. They do not know why this happens, because amylase itself does not fulfill any function related to sleep.

They have not yet managed to develop reliable tests, since the markers they have tested have given confusing results. The same happened to them when measuring the amount of saliva amylase, which was very variable from one individual to another. However, if, instead, the relative amylase concentration is measured with respect to other saliva compounds, scientists believe that they may be on track to get a marker indicating the degree of sleep.