bioRxiv · 10.1101/2022.06.01.494280
Non-rapid eye movement sleep determines resilience to social stress
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 is both necessary and sufficient for promoting resilience. They also show that differences in resilience are strongly correlated with inter-individual variability in sleep regulation.
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Bush, B. J., Donnay, C., Andrews, E.-J. A., Lewis-Sanders, D., Gray, C., Qiao, Z., Brager, A. J., Johnson, H., Brewer, H., Sood, S., Saafir, T., Benveniste, M., Paul, K. N., Ehlen, J. C.. 2022-06-01. Non-rapid eye movement sleep determines resilience to social stress. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.01.494280
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