MCLAS adaptively rescues disease-specific sleep and wake phenotypes in neurodegeneration

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Sleep alterations are hallmarks of prodromal Alzheimer’s (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), with fundamental neuropathological processes of both diseases showing susceptibility of change upon deep sleep modulation. However, promising pharmacological deep sleep enhancement results are hindered by specificity and scalability issues, thus advocating for noninvasive slow-wave activity (SWA) boosting methods to investigate the links between deep sleep and neurodegeneration. Accordingly, we have recently introduced mouse closed-loop auditory stimulation (mCLAS), which is able to successfully boost SWA during deep sleep in neurodegeneration models. Here, we aim at further exploring mCLAS’ acute effect onto disease-specific sleep and wake alterations in AD (Tg2576) and PD (M83) mice. We found that mCLAS adaptively rescues pathological sleep and wake traits depending on the disease-specific impairments observed at baseline in each model. Notably, in AD mice mCLAS significantly increases NREM long/short bout ratio, decreases vigilance state distances by decreasing transition velocities and increases the percentage of cumulative time spent in NREM sleep in the last three hours of the dark period. Contrastingly, in PD mice mCLAS significantly decreases NREM sleep consolidation, by potentiating faster and more frequent transitions between vigilance states, decreases average EMG muscle tone during REM sleep and increases alpha power in WAKE and NREM sleep. Overall, our results indicate that mCLAS selectively prompts an acute alleviation of neurodegeneration-associated sleep and wake phenotypes, by either potentiating sleep consolidation and vigilance state stability in AD or by rescuing bradysomnia and decreasing cortical hyperexcitability in PD. Further experiments assessing the electrophysiological, neuropathological and behavioural long-term effects of mCLAS in neurodegeneration may majorly impact the clinical establishment of sleep-based therapies.