Editor: Akhmetova Aigerim
Author: Bolysbek Dana
In the study "Abnormal Sleep Signals vulnerability to Chronic Social Damaging Stress," which is published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, NYUAD Associate Professor of Biology Deepesh Chaudhuri and researcher Basma Radwan describe their development of a mouse model to determine how disruptions in the slow sleep phase (NREM) increase vulnerability to future stress.
The researchers evaluated the sleep characteristics of both stress-prone and stress-resistant mice before and after chronic social damaging stress (CSD).
The social behavior of mice after stress was divided into two main phenotypes: those that are stressed, show social avoidance, and those that are resistant to stress. Before chronic stress, susceptible mice showed increased fragmentation of non-rapid eye movement sleep due to an increase in the number of switches between the slow sleep phase (NREM) and wakefulness and a shorter average duration of the non-rapid eye movement phase compared to stress-resistant mice.
Their analysis showed that the features of sleep before chronic stress in both mouse phenotypes allow predicting exposure to stress with an accuracy of more than 80%. After CSD
susceptible mice maintained high NREM fragmentation during the light and dark phases, while resistant mice showed high NREM fragmentation only in the dark.
The findings demonstrate that mice that become susceptible to stress exhibit pre-existing abnormal sleep characteristics prior to exposure to stress. In addition, subsequent exposure to stress further impairs sleep and homeostatic response.
"Our study is the first to present an animal model to examine the relationship between poor sleep continuity and vulnerability to chronic stress and depressive disorders," said Chaudhuri and Radwan. "This marker of vulnerability to stress opens up opportunities for many possible future studies that could further explain the underlying molecular processes and neural circuitry that lead to mood disorders."
Source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-01-fragmented-patterns-vulnerability...
