Sleep Fragmentation Or Interruption - 1884 Words

Abstract Sleep fragmentation or interruption is a result of many common disorders such as sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Rats in this experiment are wakened every two minutes by turning on a slow-moving treadmill for thirty seconds. As seen in this experiment, while sleep fragmentation does not affect NREM sleep, it interrupts normal sleep by reducing REM sleep, and thus its respective restoring benefits. Spatial mapping by the hippocampus will be tested after 24-hour periods of sleep interruption by observing rats in the Morris water maze. Introduction While much research has been conducted regarding sleep deprivation Tatar J, et al. 2006 demonstrates the results of sleep†¦show more content†¦Procedure Rats were put inside of a cage in which the floor is a treadmill. Two days before the experiment, the rats were conditioned to the movement of the treadmills by turning the treadmills on and off in intervals of five minutes for one hour each day. To measure electroencephalograph readings during the experiment, the rats underwent surgery under anesthesia so that the electrode could be attached to its brain in the appropriate locations. Rats had five days to get used to the cables and the treadmill cage environment. On the sixth day, EEG recordings were made for a 24-hour period to calibrate the EEG’s baseline. Some rats were aestheticized and killed after the sleep interruption portion of the experiment, and the brains were removed for testing in which will not be addressed in this paper. During the experi ment, the treadmill’s belt was programmed to run at a speed of 0.02 m/s, which were shown to cause consistent awakenings. The belt would run for 30 seconds, then stop, wait for 90 seconds, and then start running again. Therefore, the rats were interrupted from their slumber every two minutes, or 30 times an hour. There was a set of rats used as a control group. The belts for this group would run for 10 minutes, then stop for 30 minutes, then start again. In this way, there was an