A new study highlights how important uninterrupted sleep is to recovery after a traumatic brain injury, finding that fragmented sleep in injured mice is linked to a loss of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and increased fatigue. Specifically, the research shows that fragmented sleep worsens symptoms that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) alone produces – and that mice without a head injury can make up for some REM sleep loss brought on by interruptions to sleep, but injured mice do not.

Columbia researchers found that iron-deficient mice with influenza were unable to produce a key immune protein in the lungs that helps fight infections, even when iron levels returned to normal.