Abstract
Sleep quality varies widely across individuals, especially during normal aging, with impaired sleep contributing to deficits in cognition and emotional regulation. Sleep can also be impacted by a variety of adverse events, including childhood adversity. Here we examined how early life adverse events impacted later life sleep structure and physiology using an animal model to test the relationship between early life adversity and sleep quality across the life span. Rat pups were exposed to an Adversity-Scarcity model from postnatal day 8–12, where insufficient bedding for nest building induces maternal maltreatment of pups. Polysomnography and sleep physiology were assessed in weaning, early adult and older adults. Early life adversity induced age-dependent disruptions in sleep and behavior, including lifelong spindle decreases and later life NREM sleep fragmentation. Given the importance of sleep in cognitive and emotional functions, these results highlight an important factor driving variation in sleep, cognition and emotion throughout the lifespan that suggest age-appropriate and trauma informed treatment of sleep problems.
Highlights
Sleep quality varies widely across healthy individuals, especially in normal aging, and reduced quality of sleep can disrupt cognitive and emotional functioning, decreasing quality of life and mental health[1]
To verify that the low-shaving treatment modified maternal behavior towards the pups as we have previously reported[18,19,48], observations were made on a small sample of pups in low shaving (LS) and control conditions (n = 3/condition, 1 pup/litter)
LS treatment induces abusive maternal behavior during mother-pup interactions in the nest, including rough handling of pups, stepping on and dragging of the pups as well as scattered litters, pups gain weight normally. These aberrant maternal behaviors are typically limited to times when the mother enters and leaves the nest, as she roughly moves her pups within the nest and grooms them, stepping on other pups and picking them up from areas other than the species typical nape of the neck
Summary
Sleep quality varies widely across healthy individuals, especially in normal aging, and reduced quality of sleep can disrupt cognitive and emotional functioning, decreasing quality of life and mental health[1]. The goal of the present work is to further assess the link between early life adversity and sleep using an animal model of early life maltreatment from the mother and assessment of subsequent sleep quality across the lifespan. Especially abusive caregiving, is known to produce lifelong changes in neurobehavioral functioning that dramatically increases the risk of medical and public health problems, including addiction, crime, health and psychiatric illness[26], in both humans and animal models. Identifying sleep targets for therapeutic intervention is an important translational consideration for survivors of early life trauma To this end, we used a Scarcity-Adversity animal model of early life maltreatment, which produces a neurobehavioral depressive-like outcome[19,20,21]
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