Elsevier

Neuroscience Letters

Volume 490, Issue 3, 3 March 2011, Pages 165-169
Neuroscience Letters

Quantification of short-term slow wave sleep homeostasis and its disruption by minocycline in the laboratory mouse

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2010.11.034Get rights and content

Abstract

Electroencephalographic slow wave activity (SWA) during slow wave sleep (SWS) undergoes dynamic fluctuations in reaction to sleep/wake history. SWA increases as a consequence of prior waking and decreases as consequence of prior SWS. These fluctuations are evidence for a homeostatic regulatory process, the neurobiological underpinnings of which remain to be defined. The anti-neuroinflammatory agent minocycline abolishes the increase in SWA that normally occurs after 1- or 3-h sleep deprivation. We sought to determine whether this effect is also observed during spontaneous sleep. We describe a novel procedure for measuring the predictive relationship between spontaneous changes in sleep/wake states in the short-term (less than 30 min) and subsequent SWA. In saline-treated mice, 16 or more minutes of spontaneous wakefulness during a 20-min interval causes an increase in SWA during subsequent SWS, and 16 or more minutes spent in SWS causes a decrease in SWA during subsequent SWS. Minocycline administration (45 mg/kg) abolishes the increase caused by wakefulness but not the decrease caused by sleep. These data demonstrate that minocycline attenuates SWA dynamics in spontaneous sleep. Inflammatory events in the brain may underlie, in part, wakefulness-induced changes in the sleep electroencephalogram.

Research highlights

▶ Novel analysis reveals short term (<30 min) slow wave sleep homeostasis in mice. ▶ Non-rapid eye movement sleep EEG power increases significantly after >80% of time spent awake in 20 min. ▶ Non-rapid eye movement sleep EEG power decreases significantly after >80% of time spent in SWS in 20 min. ▶ This EEG response to wake is attenuated by anti-neuroinflammatory agent minocycline.

Section snippets

Acknowledgements

These studies were supported by a Washington State University, Spokane Faculty Seed Grant. We thank Paul Franken for insightful comments on the manuscript.

References (13)

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