

Researchers Show How Lost Sleep Leads to Lost Neurons in Mice - kjhughes
http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/2014/03/veasey/

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sillysaurus3
Would anyone please link directly to the pdf of the paper so I can see for
myself how they're keeping the mice awake?

The typical way is for them to put the mice in a position such that it's
impossible for them to fall asleep without falling into water. All that this
proves is that extended stress leads to lost neurons, not necessarily the
sleep loss.

People often cite the "Fatal Familial Insomnia" disease as evidence of lack of
sleep's ill effects, but they neglect to point out that the "insomnia" part is
sometimes not observed in patients who then die anyway. So the sleep loss is
apparently unrelated to the death.

There doesn't seem to be any conclusive evidence linking sleep loss to
neurodegeneration. It's seemingly just something that people want to believe
in absence of evidence.

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vwinsyee
Abstract:
[http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/12/4418.short](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/12/4418.short)
Full Text PDF:
[http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/12/4418.full.pdf](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/12/4418.full.pdf)

I'm on an academic network, so I'm not sure if the PDF's paywalled...

From a cursory glance at the paper, this is what they had to say about how
they kept the mice awake:

 _Mice were housed in a light /dark environment with lights on from 6:00 A.M.
to 6:00 P.M. ... A previously validated, enriched, novel environment (Gompf et
al., 2010) was used to promote spontaneous exploratory wakefulness. The short-
term wakefulness (Sh Wake) period selected was 3 h during the lights-on
period. With zeitgeber time 0 h (ZT0) referenced to the onset of the lights-on
period, Sh Wake occurred at ZT8–ZT11, while extended sleep loss (Ext Wake)
consisted of 8 h of continuous wake time at ZT3–ZT11 with 16 h intervals in
the home cages after the first and second days of 8 h wake time._

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sillysaurus3
Yes, the PDF is paywalled. Would you mind posting a Dropbox link to it or
emailing it to me? Thanks!

This is a very interesting paper, but I need to analyze the specific method
they used to keep mice awake. All that paragraph says is "we used a previously
validated technique," with no details as to how specifically they woke the
mice up.

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treePhase
I believe this is the cited paper:
[http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/43/14543.full.pdf](http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/43/14543.full.pdf)

They describe the "novel environment" starting on page 3.

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TrainedMonkey
In mice:

"SirT3 is essential across short-term sleep loss to maintain metabolic
homeostasis, but in extended wakefulness, the SirT3 response is missing. After
several days of shift worker sleep patterns, LC neurons in the mice began to
display reduced SirT3, increased cell death, and the mice lost 25 percent of
these neurons."

