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Virtual Roundtable Discussion – Sleep Control, Stress & Emotion
1 February 2023 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm CET
Register for the ESRS Virtual Roundtable Discussion on Sleep Control, Stress & Emotion – Wednesday, 1 February 2023.
ESRS President Pierre-Hervé Luppi will moderate the discussion on new breakthrough evidence with several participants:
Xiao Yu & William Wisden (Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, United Kingdom)
Linking stress and restorative sleep (A specific circuit in the midbrain detects stress and induces restorative sleep, doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abn0853)
Often stress causes insomnia. This is most people’s everyday experience. But we will look at data showing how certain types of stressors, such as social defeat stress, an ethological model for psychosocial stress, induce sleep rather than insomnia. We will discuss the circuitry involving special types of inhibitory neuron in the midbrain (ventral tegmental area) that respond to stress to induce NREM and REM sleep. This type of sleep following stress contributes to the reduction of anxiety and the circuit which produces this sleep may offer a new perspective on treating anxiety disorders.
Takeshi Sakurai & Emi Hasegawa (Faculty of Medicine/International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, University of Tsukuba, Japan)
Role of amygdala and dopamine in the mechanism of REM sleep regulation (Rapid eye movement sleep is initiated by basolateral amygdala dopamine signaling in mice, doi: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abl6618)
Although pharmacological studies have indicated that dopamine (DA) can influence REM sleep, the DA system was absent in most recognized REM sleep models. We found that a transient increase of dopamine (DA) in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) during NREM sleep initiates REM sleep, acting on Drd2-expressing neurons to induce disinhibition of the amygdala, which lead the NREM-to-REM transition. This mechanism also played a role in cataplectic attacks-a pathological intrusion of REM sleep into wakefulness-in narcoleptics.
