All-nighters Sometimes Combat Depression

[Chip (OP)]

Source: https://www.the-scientist.com/all-nighters-sometimes-combat-depression-71571

All-nighters Sometimes Combat Depression

Jan 5, 2024

"All-nighters Sometimes Combat Depression Dopamine pathways play a key role in the surprising effects of sleep deprivation on mood".

For most people, staying up all night is a surefire way to spend the following day in a terrible mood.

However, for about half of individuals with depression, a sleepless night has the opposite effect:

It substantially reduces depressive symptoms.

Unlike many conventional antidepressants, which can take weeks to reach full efficacy, the mood-boosting effects of sleep deprivation kick in within hours.

On the other hand, sleep deprivation can sometimes trigger the onset of a manic episode in people with bipolar disorder.

Sleep deprivation can alter affective states; scientists are beginning to understand how. Yevgenia Kozorovitskiy, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, wanted to understand the neurobiological mechanisms mediating these sleep deprivation induced shifts in mood, hoping to gain insights into the underlying pathophysiology of these pernicious affective disorders. In a study published in Neuron, Kozorovitskiy and her team reported distinct dopaminergic pathways in mice that regulate different types of sleep deprivation induced behavioral changes.

“This is a pretty impressive set of experiments,” said Nadja Freund, a molecular psychiatry researcher at Ruhr University Bochum who was not involved in the study. “As someone who is working on dopamine and models of bipolar disorder, I found it very, very interesting.” Kozorovitskiy and her team used the well established learned helplessness paradigm by subjecting animals to unpredictable and inescapable stressors to generate a mouse version of depression demonstrated by the animals’ reduced preference for sugar water and their failure to attempt escape when the stressor became avoidable.

While noting that animal models can never truly encompass the experience of human affective disorders, Kozorovitskiy said, “this is a way to assess in animals the sense of hopelessness that is seen in so many individuals with depression.”