Animal Models of Sleep Disorder

Cannabinoids, Endocannabinoids and Sleep

“…SWS is characterized by, as the name implies, high amplitude EEG activity in slower frequency delta ranges, a lack of EMG activity, and large bouts of higher-frequency EEG activity arising from a thalamocortical activity known as ''sleep spindles'' (De Gennaro and Ferrara, 2003;Iber et al, 2007). In rodents, it is not clear if there is rapid eye movement during sleep, and thus the phases with REM-like EEG and no EMG activity are often referred to as paradoxical sleep (PS; Toth and Bhargava, 2013). Furthermore, separation of the different stages of SWS sleep is not as obvious as in humans, thus this characterization is not always performed.…”

“…Humans often have confounding prior experiences and pre-existing conditions, which is particularly pertinent to sleep research considering that sleep is so easily modulated by many internal and external conditions (Brower and Perron, 2010;Staner, 2010;Kalmbach et al, 2016). Animal models provide an attractive alternative to control for and overcome these concerns (Toth and Bhargava, 2013). Mice and rats are often chosen because of their wide use and availability, similarity to humans in terms of sleep neurocircuitry and neurochemistry, and, particularly in the case of mice, the potential for genetic manipulations such as transgenics, knock-ins, and knockouts.…”

“…Mice and rats are polyphasic sleepers with shorter and more frequent bouts of SWS and PS, compared to humans that typically show monophasic sleep with more consolidated sleep bouts (Campbell and Tobler, 1984). Also, mice and rats spend more time sleeping (12-15 h) than humans (7-8 h) per day (see Figure 3 in Toth and Bhargava, 2013), and mice are most active nocturnally while humans are almost strictly diurnal. Despite differences in timing and architecture of sleep, the apparent similarities to human sleep have made using animal models fundamental to furthering the understanding of the neurobiology of sleep and many important advancements in treatments for sleep pathologies, including insomnia (Wisor et al, 2009), sleep apnea (Yamauchi et al, 2010), and perhaps most famously the role of orexigenic neurons in narcolepsy (Chemelli et al, 1999), can be attributed to pre-clinical research using mice and rats.…”

Repeated afternoon sleep recordings indicate first‐night‐effect‐like adaptation process in family dogs

“…functional magnetic resonance imaging (Andics et al, 2016;Berns, Brooks, & Spivak, 2012) and electroencephalography (EEG)-based (ERP) methods (Howell, Conduit, Toukhsati, & Bennett, 2011;Kujala et al, 2013). A somewhat independent line of research investigates the characteristics of the dogs' sleep, mainly building on the fact that the general architecture of human sleep is better approximated by dog sleep, and not by the most commonly used laboratory animals (Toth & Bhargava, 2013). Strong interrelatedness has been discovered between dogs' sleep and awake functioning, including memory consolidation (Iotchev et al, 2017;Kis, Szakadát, et al, 2017) and emotion processing (Kis, Gergely, et al, 2017).…”