Improving sleep helps mice with Huntington disease

Researchers in Cambridge, England, studied the sleeping and waking cycles of mice with the genetic mutation for Huntington disease (HD), an inherited neurological disorder. The researchers found that these mice showed a disturbed sleep pattern that worsens as the disease progresses. Because lack of sleep can affect brain function, the researchers tested whether sleep and cognitive disturbances could be reversed by using a sedative drug, alprazolam (Xanax), to impose a daily cycle of sleep in the mice. Daily treatment with alprazolam improved the cognitive performance of the mice in a simple visual task. The results suggest that managing the sleep disturbances present in Huntington disease may help slow the mental impairments that occur in the disease.

Pallier, Patrick N., Elizabeth S. Maywood, Zhiguang Zheng, Johanna E. Chesham, Alexei N. Inyushkin, Richard Dyball, Michael H. Hastings, & A. Jennifer Morton. "Pharmacological Imposition of Sleep Slows Cognitive Decline and Reverses Dysregulation of Circadian Gene Expression in a Transgenic Mouse Model of Huntington's Disease." Journal of Neuroscience 27(2007): 7869-7878.

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