Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Frozen By Worry And Fatigue? A Mixed Methods Approach To Understanding The Lived Experiences Of Freezing Of Gait, Sarah M. Ghose

Theses and Dissertations

This study utilized a mixed methods emergent, phenomenological approach to (1) understanding the lived experience of freezing of gait for individuals diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and (2) determining the role of anxiety and sleep in freezing of gait outcomes. Participants included 13 adults diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease (N=14 for qualitative data, N=13 for quantitative data; 23.1% female-identifying, 76.9% male-identifying) who were predominantly white (92.3%) with an average age of 69 years (SD = 6.73 years). Data collection consisted of semi-structured interviews, self-report measures, actigraphic sleep data, and salivary alpha amylase biomarker collection. Results are organized into …

Effective Pharmacological And Non-Pharmacological Treatments For Sleep Disturbances And Fatigue In Patients Who Have Experienced A Mild To Severe Traumatic Brain Injury, Mika Muras

Theses and Graduate Projects

Background: In the United States alone, an estimated 1.5 million people sustain a head injury every year.1 With improved recognition of traumatic brain injuries by healthcare providers, the number of patients diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) is only increasing. Unfortunately, many patients who sustain a TBI, regardless of the severity, experience sleep disturbances, insomnia, fatigue, and daytime sleepiness.

Purpose: For the purposes of this systematic review, the focus will be primarily on the comparison of nonpharmacological treatments of sleep disturbances or fatigue secondary to a TBI. In addition, the focus will include recent studies on pharmacological …

Headache And Its Association With Adhd/Add And Stimulant Medication, Claire Nitzsche

Honors Scholar Theses

Years of research has shown that headache (in terms of frequency, duration, and severity) is perpetuated by dysregulation of lifestyle behaviors such as sleep habits, eating habits, level of stress, physical activity etc. Our project aims to explore the potential combined and independent impacts that having ADHD/ADD and taking stimulant drugs have on disrupting one’s lifestyle and examine whether dysregulated lifestyle behaviors contribute to one’s headache experience. No research has investigated how both ADHD/ADD and stimulant drug use effect headache experience. In this cross-sectional study, 177 UConn undergraduate students completed a 10-minute survey regarding lifestyle behaviors and headache experience. Participants …

Modulation Of Sleep-Courtship Balance By Nutritional Status In Drosophila, José M Duhart, Victoria Baccini, Yanan Zhang, Daniel R Machado, Kyunghee Koh

Farber Institute for Neuroscience Faculty Papers

Sleep is essential but incompatible with other behaviors, and thus sleep drive competes with other motivations. We previously showed Drosophila males balance sleep and courtship via octopaminergic neurons that act upstream of courtship-regulating P1 neurons (Machado et al., 2017). Here, we show nutrition modulates the sleep-courtship balance and identify sleep-regulatory neurons downstream of P1 neurons. Yeast-deprived males exhibited attenuated female-induced nighttime sleep loss yet normal daytime courtship, which suggests male flies consider nutritional status in deciding whether the potential benefit of pursuing female partners outweighs the cost of losing sleep. Trans-synaptic tracing and calcium imaging identified dopaminergic neurons projecting to …

A Comparative Study Of Sleep And Diurnal Patterns In House Mouse (Mus Musculus) And Spiny Mouse (Acomys Cahirinus), Chanung Wang, Lauren E. Guerriero, Dillon M. Huffman, Asma'a A. Ajwad, Trae C. Brooks, Sridhar Sunderam, Ashley W. Seifert, Bruce F. O'Hara

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications

Most published sleep studies use three species: human, house mouse, or Norway rat. The degree to which data from these species captures variability in mammalian sleep remains unclear. To gain insight into mammalian sleep diversity, we examined sleep architecture in the spiny basal murid rodent Acomys cahirinus. First, we used a piezoelectric system validated for Mus musculus to monitor sleep in both species. We also included wild M. musculus to control for alterations generated by laboratory-reared conditions for M. musculus. Using this comparative framework, we found that A. cahirinus, lab M. musculus, and wild M. musculus were …

Brain Development: Why The Young Sleep Longer, Budhaditya Chowdhury, Orie T. Shafer

Advanced Science Research Center

From absorbing new languages to mastering musical instruments, young children are wired to learn in ways that adults are not (Johnson and Newport, 1989). This ability coincides with periods of intense brain plasticity during which neurons can easily remodel their connections (Hubel and Wiesel, 1970). Many children are also scandalously good sleepers, typically getting several more hours of sleep per night than their parents (Jenni and Carskadon, 2007). As sleep deprivation has negative effects on learning and memory, learning like a child likely requires sleeping like one (Diekelmann and Born, 2010). Yet, how the ability to sleep for longer is …

Editorial: Sudden Unexpected Death In Epilepsy: Bio-Markers, Mechanisms, Risk Identification And Prevention., Rainer Surges, Michael R. Sperling, Christopher M. Degiorgio

Department of Neurology Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Aging On Sleep Parameters In A Healthy, Melatonin-Competent Mouse Model, Jiffin K. Paulose, Chanung Wang, Bruce F. O'Hara, Vincent M. Cassone

Biology Faculty Publications

Background: Sleep disturbances are common maladies associated with human age. Sleep duration is decreased, sleep fragmentation is increased, and the timing of sleep onset and sleep offset is earlier. These disturbances have been associated with several neurodegenerative diseases. Mouse models for human sleep disturbances can be powerful due to the accessibility to neuroscientific and genetic approaches, but these are hampered by the fact that most mouse models employed in sleep research have spontaneous mutations in the biosynthetic pathway(s) regulating the rhythmic production of the pineal hormone melatonin, which has been implicated in human sleep.

Purpose and method: The present study …

Molecular Mechanisms Of Cancer-Induced Sleep Disruption, William H. Walker, Jeremy C. Borniger

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Sleep is essential for health. Indeed, poor sleep is consistently linked to the development of systemic disease, including depression, metabolic syndrome, and cognitive impairments. Further evidence has accumulated suggesting the role of sleep in cancer initiation and progression (primarily breast cancer). Indeed, patients with cancer and cancer survivors frequently experience poor sleep, manifesting as insomnia, circadian misalignment, hypersomnia, somnolence syndrome, hot flushes, and nightmares. These problems are associated with a reduction in the patients’ quality of life and increased mortality. Due to the heterogeneity among cancers, treatment regimens, patient populations and lifestyle factors, the etiology of cancer-induced sleep disruption is …

Genetic Variation In Aquaporin-4 Moderates The Relationship Between Sleep And Brain Aβ-Amyloid Burden, Stephanie Rainey-Smith, Gavin N. Mazzucchelli, Victor L. Villemagne, Belinda M. Brown, Tenielle Porter, Michael Weinborn, Romola Bucks, Lidija Milicic, Hamid R. Sohrabi, Kevin Taddei, David J. Ames, Paul T. Maruff, Colin L. Masters, Christopher C. Rowe, Olivier Salvado, Ralph N. Martins, Simon M. Laws

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The glymphatic system is postulated to be a mechanism of brain Aβ-Amyloid clearance and to be most effective during sleep. Ablation of the astrocytic end-feet expressed water-channel protein, Aquaporin-4, in mice, results in impairment of this clearance mechanism and increased brain Aβ-Amyloid deposition, suggesting that Aquaporin-4 plays a pivotal role in glymphatic function. Currently there is a paucity of literature regarding the impact of AQP4 genetic variation on sleep, brain Aβ-Amyloid burden and their relationship to each other in humans. To address this a cross-sectional observational study was undertaken in cognitively normal older adults from the Australian Imaging, Biomarkers and …

Bimodal Coupling Of Ripples And Slower Oscillations During Sleep In Patients With Focal Epilepsy., Inkyung Song, Iren Orosz, Inna Chervoneva, Zachary J. Waldman, Itzhak Fried, Chengyuan Wu, Ashwini Sharan, Noriko Salamon, Richard Gorniak, Sandra Dewar, Anatol Bragin, Jerome Engel, Michael R. Sperling, Richard Staba, Shennan A. Weiss

Department of Neurology Faculty Papers

OBJECTIVE: Differentiating pathologic and physiologic high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) is challenging. In patients with focal epilepsy, HFOs occur during the transitional periods between the up and down state of slow waves. The preferred phase angles of this form of phase-event amplitude coupling are bimodally distributed, and the ripples (80-150 Hz) that occur during the up-down transition more often occur in the seizure-onset zone (SOZ). We investigated if bimodal ripple coupling was also evident for faster sleep oscillations, and could identify the SOZ.

METHODS: Using an automated ripple detector, we identified ripple events in 40-60 min intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings from 23 …

Sleep Medicine: A Deserted Field In Pakistan, Bhojo A. Khealani

Pakistan Journal of Neurological Sciences (PJNS)

Sleep is an important and essential aspect of life and we spend about one third of our lives sleeping. Sleep disorders often manifest with insomnia and excessive daytime sleepiness. Large population based studies have shown that people who sleep longer and lesser have shorter life span1,2. Other symptoms of the slep disorders include snoring, abnormal motor behaviors etc.

Taranis Functions With Cyclin A And Cdk1 In A Novel Arousal Center To Control Sleep In Drosophila., Dinis J.S. Afonso, Die Liu, Daniel R. Machado, Huihui Pan, James E.C. Jepson, Dragana Rogulja, Kyunghee Koh

Department of Neuroscience Faculty Papers

Sleep is an essential and conserved behavior whose regulation at the molecular and anatomical level remains to be elucidated. Here, we identify TARANIS (TARA), a Drosophila homolog of the Trip-Br (SERTAD) family of transcriptional coregulators, as a molecule that is required for normal sleep patterns. Through a forward-genetic screen, we isolated tara as a novel sleep gene associated with a marked reduction in sleep amount. Targeted knockdown of tara suggests that it functions in cholinergic neurons to promote sleep. tara encodes a conserved cell-cycle protein that contains a Cyclin A (CycA)-binding homology domain. TARA regulates CycA protein levels and genetically …