Non-rapid eye movement sleep determines resilience to social stress
- Morehouse School of Medicine, United States
- Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, United States
- University of California, Los Angeles, United States
Abstract
Resilience, the ability to overcome stressful conditions, is found in most mammals and varies significantly among individuals. A lack of resilience can lead to the development of neuropsychiatric and sleep disorders, often within the same individual. Despite extensive research into the brain mechanisms causing maladaptive behavioral-responses to stress, it is not clear why some individuals exhibit resilience. To examine if sleep has a determinative role in maladaptive behavioral-response to social stress, we investigated individual variations in resilience using a social-defeat model for male mice. Our results reveal a direct, causal relationship between sleep amount and resilience-demonstrating that sleep increases after social-defeat stress only occur in resilient mice. Further, we found that within the prefrontal cortex, a regulator of maladaptive responses to stress, pre-existing differences in sleep regulation predict resilience. Overall, these results demonstrate that increased NREM sleep, mediated cortically, is an active response to social-defeat stress that plays a determinative role in promoting resilience. They also show that differences in resilience are strongly correlated with inter-individual variability in sleep regulation.
Data availability
Data generated in this study are deposited in Dryad.
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Non-rapid eye movement sleep determines resilience to social stressDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.x0k6djhn4.
Article and author information
Author details
J Christopher Ehlen
Funding
National Institute of General Medical Sciences (GM127260)
- J Christopher Ehlen
National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (Pilot funding,MD007602)
- J Christopher Ehlen
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NS078410)
- Ketema N Paul
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Graduate Student Fellowship,HL103104)
- Brittany J Bush
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Graduate Student Fellowship,HL007901)
- Eva-Jeneé A Andrews
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Postdoctoral Fellowship,HL117929)
- Cloe L Gray
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (Postdoctoral Fellowship,HL116077)
- Allison J Brager
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. All of the animals were handled according to a protocol (21-02) approved by the Morehouse School of Medicine institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC). All surgery was performed under isoflurane anesthesia, and analgesia was provided. Every effort was made to minimize pain and suffering.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Non-rapid eye movement sleep determines resilience to social stress
eLife 11:e80206.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.80206
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