27 June 2017 10:15 am
(Daily Mail,), 26 June 2017 - If you toss and turn at night struggling to nod off, you may think stress is to blame for your whirring brain.
But the real explanation may lie deep within your genetic make-up.
A Dutch study has identified seven genes that put people at increased risk of developing sleeplessness.
Their discovery, that a tendency to suffer sleep problems is biological, rather than psychological, is a whole new approach and gives hope to the third of adults who have sleep problems.
It means that targeted treatments could be developed, rather than the ten million prescriptions for sleeping tablets that are made each year.
The research, by scientists at Vrije University in Amsterdam, was carried out by mapping the DNA of more than 113,000 people from Britain and the Netherlands.‘Our research brings a new perspective. Insomnia is also in the genes.’ The professor, whose work is published in the Nature Genetics journal, said