While sleep deprivation affects both men and women, it appears that women could be better at handling it compared to men.
Estrogen and Sleep Deprivation
According to two recently presented studies, female rodents were found to be more resilient due to their hormones in the face of sleep deprivation. The studies were presented during Neuroscience 2023, the Society of Neuroscience's annual meeting. It is held in Washington, D.C., from November 11 to 15.
One of the studies discovered that female mouse hormonal changes contribute to resilience amidst sleep deprivation. The other study shed light on how the effect of estrogen hormones on rat sleep is affected by astrocyte brain cells.
It has been a long-standing thought that the sex hormones of females play crucial roles when it comes to sleep and sleep deprivation. This is so as women have a double likelihood, compared to men, to experience sleep disruptions. This is especially true during menopause, menarche, and puberty.
Neuropharmacology professor Jessia Mong from the School of Medicine at the University of Maryland, who is a co-author of one study, explains that it is projected that 35% to 50% of menopausal or perimenopausal women will have reported sleep problems. This is compared to 15% of the whole population.
The team of Mong discovered that astrocyte cells could mediate the effects of estrogen hormones on sleep. These are non-neuronal cells in the brain's preoptic region, regulating sleep.
Mong explains that astrocytes are a kind of glial cells, which are believed to hold the neurons and the brain together. However, over the last 30 years, research has revealed that this was not the case.
The sleep-mediating role of astrocytes is quite a recent finding, while estrogen action's role in sleep is an entirely new finding.
As part of the study, astrocytes among the rats were inhibited by the researchers. They then discovered that this prevented estrogen action in sleep. This posits that estrogen could be activating or stimulating astrocytes.
Mong explains that the findings are significant as they are one of the earliest demonstrations of estrogen's capacity for sleep regulation. The results could also offer future drug and sleep aid targets that could work better for women.
Despite how the study was conducted among rodents, Mong believes that the case between estrogen and sleep deprivation could be similar.
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Female Mice Found to be More Resilient in the Face of Sleep Deprivation
The second study discovered that female mice were more resilient in the face of sleep deprivation than their male counterparts. The study found that female mouse gene expression, after a case of sleep deprivation, was less different among females than males.
It was observed that following sleep deprivation, 99 genes had altered expression among females, while more than 1,100 male genes were affected.
After three days of pre-handling and a week of individual housing, the mice were deprived of sleep through gentle handling for five hours. Brain regions were then frozen and dissected. The mice that were not sleep-deprived were dissected simultaneously to avoid gene expression confounds.
The researchers used an approach for unbiased RNA sequencing, which enabled them to find out the greater levels of resilience in gene expression among female mice compared to their male counterparts. On top of only observing 99 affected hippocampus genes in the female mice, the female mice in the proestrus stage did not display any significant changes in hippocampal gene expression. This was observed between non-sleep-deprived and sleep-deprived rodents.
These could be linked to differences in hormones, which supports the findings of the other study. The authors note that though the gene expression resilience impact remains unknown, the results show that sleep deprivation leads to specific changes across sexes and that female hormonal changes offer a certain degree of sleep deprivation resilience.
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