Therapeutic Sleep for Traumatic Brain Injury
Abstract
After a good night s sleep, we feel refreshed. Anyone who has been awake for more than 24 hours notices the detrimental effects: our mood darkens, our cognitive performance worsens, and we become more prone to accidents as our reflexes slow down, demonstrating that the effects of losing even a single night of sleep are diverse and dramatic. However, after we catch up on our sleep, these myriad symptoms disappear. Now imagine what would happen if you are never able to fully catch up on your sleep. Unfortunately, this is the situation that many patients with neurological or psychiatric disorders are in. On top of the already debilitating symptoms these patients deal with on a day-to-day basis, they also suffer from sleep disorders more often than not. Recent studies on sleep showed that one important function of sleep lies in clearing toxins and waste products from the brain. Thus, persistent lack of good quality sleep could set off a snowball effect, where a psychiatric or neurological disorder causes sleep problems, which in turn prevent the brain from fully clearing out toxins, which then cause more brain damage, which decreases sleep quality even more. This proposal will test the hypothesis that correcting sleep disorders can have a therapeutic effect, improving recovery and breaking the cycle where impaired sleep further damages the brain. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an excellent testing ground for this hypothesis. The majority of TBI patients develop sleep disorders, a correlation that is extremely prevalent in military personnel, where up to 97% of deployed Soldiers who develop TBI also report sleep disorders. Unlike other neurological disorders, TBI can be directly induced in model organisms. Because sleep before TBI can be measured, we will know exactly how TBI changes sleep in each subject and how to correct post-TBI sleep back to baseline levels. The innovative aspect of this proposal lies in the use of sleep as a treatment for TBI. Sleep disorders are common in many neurological and psychiatric disorders, including TBI, yet treatments are scarce. By using a combination of high-throughput behavioral screening of TBI-induced sleep disorders and advanced genetic tools that allow optogenetic control of sleep and wake to either correct or exacerbate TBI-induced sleep disorders, this project evaluates whether restoring sleep to baseline levels can have a therapeutic effect. The finding of a protective role for sleep in a fly model of TBI-induced sleep disorders will open up this model organism to a full genetic analysis of the underlying molecular mechanisms of the neuroprotective role of sleep.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jan 31, 2017
- Source ID
- W81XWH1610166
Entities
People
- Ravi Allada
Organizations
- Northwestern University
- United States Army