Increasing Sleep Time After Trauma Could Ease Ill Effects

Summary: Increasing time spent sleeping immediately following a traumatic event can help to significantly reduce the effects of trauma.

Source: Washington State University

Increasing the amount of time spent asleep immediately after a traumatic experience may ease any negative consequences, suggests a new study conducted by researchers at Washington State University’s Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine.

Published today inĀ Scientific Reports, the study helps build a case for the use of sleep therapeutics following trauma exposure, said William Vanderheyden, an assistant research professor and the lead author on the study. “Basically, our study has found that if you can improve sleep, you can improve function.”

The finding holds particular promise for populations that are routinely exposed to trauma, such as military personnel and first responders, and may also benefit victims of accidents, natural disaster, violence, and abuse.

Vanderheyden made the discovery following a series of experiments in rats in which he and coauthor Christopher Davis examined the links between poor sleep and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)–a psychiatric condition that affects an estimated 8 million Americans each year.

“People with PTSD oftentimes experience nightmares and other types of sleep disturbances, such as frequent awakenings and insomnia,” said Vanderheyden. “One thought was that those sleep disturbances may cause further cognitive impairment and worsen the effects of PTSD or the initial trauma. So we wanted to see whether repairing the sleep disturbances associated with trauma exposure could help alleviate the symptoms of PTSD.”

Their study used methods reviewed and approved by Washington State University’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which oversees all university animal research procedures to ensure animals’ humane treatment throughout their lifecycle. This included a commonly used PTSD rodent model in combination with optogenetics, a technique that uses light-sensitive proteins to control the activity of brain cells.

After going through the PTSD protocol, rats were assigned to two groups. In one group, the researchers used optogenetic stimulation to activate melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH)–a sleep-promoting brain cell type–over a period of seven days. Animals in the second group served as controls.

Comparing the two groups, the researchers found that optogenetic stimulation increased the duration of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep–the sleep phase thought to be important for learning and memory–across the rats’ rest and active phases.

The researchers then assessed the rats’ behavior on a three-day classical conditioning experiment involving a memory task. On day one, rats learned to associate an audible tone with the mildly unpleasant experience of receiving a small foot shock immediately after hearing the tone.

After several occurrences, rats would freeze after hearing the tone, anticipating the foot shock. On day two, they heard the tone 30 times without receiving the shock, allowing them to gradually extinguish that memory. On the third day, the researchers played the tone 10 times to test to what extent the previous day’s memory extinction had stuck.

They found that rats that had received optogenetic stimulation to increase their sleep time had more successfully extinguished the memory, freezing less than control rats.

“This highlights that there is a time-sensitive window when–if you intervene to improve sleep–you could potentially stave off the negative effects of trauma,” Vanderheyden said. “Conversely, it seems likely that if you are kept awake after a trauma, this could potentially be harmful to your cognitive function, though we haven’t directly tested this as part of our study.”

This shows a woman sleeping
The finding holds particular promise for populations that are routinely exposed to trauma, such as military personnel and first responders, and may also benefit victims of accidents, natural disaster, violence, and abuse. Image is in the public domain

As an example, he mentioned victims of traffic accidents, who may not get much opportunity to sleep as they are poked, prodded, examined, and treated after being hospitalized for injuries. Though prioritizing sleep may not be feasible in victims with potentially life-threatening injuries, increasing sleep in other trauma-exposed populations could practically be done. Military personnel coming back from patrol could be encouraged to sleep and potentially be given sleep-promoting drugs to help them stave off any trauma experienced during their patrol, Vanderheyden said.

Vanderheyden cautioned that although their experiments suggest that manipulating sleep immediately after a trauma may be beneficial, such an intervention may or may not be effective for traumatic experiences that occurred in the more distant past.

As a next step, Vanderheyden and Davis want to delve deeper into molecular mechanisms that improve function in response to increased sleep. Their goal is to pinpoint those molecules that are important for regulating sleep or learning and memory, which will help them identify targets for the development of better drugs to help trauma-exposed populations.

Based on their findings, Vanderheyden also suggested that the use of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in people with PTSD may need to be reexamined, as SSRIs are known to suppress REM sleep.

“We may be doing our trauma victims a disservice by prescribing a class of drugs that actually eliminates a potential therapeutic avenue for them by removing their REM sleep when our findings suggest that we should be increasing REM sleep,” Vanderheyden said.

Funding: Funding for the study came from the U.S. Department of Defense-administered Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

About this psychology and sleep research news

Source: Washington State University
Contact: William Vanderheyden – Washington State University
Image: The image is in the public domain

Original Research: Open access.
Optogenetic sleep enhancement improves fear-associated memory processing following trauma exposure in rats” by Vanderheyden et al. Scientific Reports


Abstract

Optogenetic sleep enhancement improves fear-associated memory processing following trauma exposure in rats

Sleep disturbances are commonly found in trauma-exposed populations. Additionally, trauma exposure results in fear-associated memory impairments. Given the interactions of sleep with learning and memory, we hypothesized that increasing sleep duration following trauma exposure would restore overall function and improve trauma-induced fear-associated memory dysfunction. Here, we utilized single prolonged stress, a validated rodent model of post-traumatic stress disorder, in combination with optogenetic activation of hypothalamic melanin-concentrating hormone containing cells to increase sleep duration. The goal of this work was to ascertain if post-trauma sleep increases are sufficient to improve fear-associated memory function. In our laboratory, optogenetic stimulation after trauma exposure was sufficient to increase REM sleep duration during both the Light and Dark Phase, whereas NREM sleep duration was only increased during the Dark Phase of the circadian day. Interestingly though, animals that received optogenetic stimulation showed significantly improved fear-associated memory processing compared to non-stimulated controls. These results suggest that sleep therapeutics immediately following trauma exposure may be beneficial and that post-trauma sleep needs to be further examined in the context of the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.

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  1. Increasing Sleep Time After Trauma : I completely agree with these findings ! I was hurt horribly in a car accident years ago. I was in a wheelchair for 10 months & also had my mouth wired shut for 10 months. My family was going through abuse from our stepfather, and he ended up pulling a gun out on all of us even. I didn’t sleep much after the accident because of this and other things. When I finally could go back to work years later, I was up day and night. I even worked every day for over a month. I had always been the logical one and organized one in the family. But after all of this I had a mental break down. My mother kept telling me that I was different than I had been before. She would never explain how though. Well I ended up on Social Security Disability. Now I get stressed out very easily. I end up sleeping anywhere from 2 to 3 days straight. I don’t wake up to go to the bathroom, get something to drink,or for a cigarette. I am a smoke aholic too. Also nothing can wake me up ! Thank You for your study !

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