Recovery From Chronic Sleep Fragmentation after Traumatic Brain Injury Does Not Cause Lasting Deficits in Cognitive Behavior
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Date
2022-05
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Publisher
The Ohio State University
Abstract
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) impairs cognitive function of learning and memory,
which can be worsened by post-TBI stressors. Many stressors cause sleep disturbances
in the TBI population which leads us to use mechanical sleep fragmentation (SF) as a
physiologically relevant approach to study the effects of stress after injury. We previously
showed that post-TBI SF impairs cognitive function 30 days post injury (DPI). Therefore,
we hypothesize that after a 30-day recovery period we will still see stress effects in
learning and memory. To test this, we gave male and female mice a moderate lateral fluid
percussion TBI or sham injury and left them undisturbed or exposed to SF daily for 30
DPI. Afterwards all mice were left undisturbed for an additional 30 DPI and Barnes maze
testing was done during this recovery period. We found that there is an uncoupling of
within and between day performance within the Barnes maze task for the sleep
fragmentation recovery (SF-R) TBI group but no discrepancies otherwise for acquisition
of this spatial task. SF-R, regardless of TBI, increased percent time in goal quadrant
during the probe trial. We also found there to be higher activity of ∆FosB in the CA1 of
Sham SF-R animals, indicating increased neuronal activity with sham SF-R but not TBI
SF-R. Therefore, our data shows that while there is some evidence of persistent
hippocampal deficits, overall, there are no robust lasting effects of chronic post-TBI SF
following 30 days of recovery.