Continuing Education on Sleep for Physicians

The circadian clock is an endogenous timing system that regulates in a daily manner physiological functions and behavior by modulating gene expression and protein function.

In the last decades a vast empirical and theoretical knowledge about sleep mechanisms has been accumulated. Surprisingly, the function of sleep still remains elusive. Moreover, in place of the long-standing question “why do we sleep?” now comes a more fundamental one: “what is sleep?”