Abstract

The fact remains that neurophysiologic factors in the central regulatory mechanism of sleep is still far from full understanding. Most of the postulations by various workers on the subject of sleep still appear to be more of speculative; there is no clear evidence to suggest that a particular neurotransmitter agent may mediate the proposed mechanism attribute to it in the mechanism of the transition between one stage of sleep and another. It was the aim of this review to identify the neurotransmitter systems variously implicated in the subject of sleep regulation and have featured more prominently in the reports of various researchers in recent past. The method of information gathering was adopted in this review and the sources of information included, published works of past and present researchers, articles on sleep in seminars, conference articles on sleep physiology, textbooks of current editions in neuroscience, lecture notes on neurophysiology and reports accessed from the Internet using search engines such as Google were also among the sources of information consulted etc. In conclusion, this review study have clearly highlighted the major neurotransmitter systems that have gained more prominent mention and featured more frequently in the works of most researchers and therefore can be said to be currently the more under study.

Keywords:

Neurotransmitter systems, sleep, regulatory mechanism,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.