Short communicationExperimental sleep fragmentation and sleep deprivation in rats increases exploration in an open field test of anxiety while increasing plasma corticosterone levels
Section snippets
Open field test of anxiety
Fig. 1 illustrates the rodents’ behaviors in the open field task. As shown in Fig. 1A, the disruption of sleep in rats resulted in a significant change in the percent time spent in the open field (F(3,24) = 8.599, p < 0.001) so that when compared to exercise control rats (n = 8), rats spent significantly more time in the open space in both the 24 h total sleep deprivation (n = 6, Fisher’s, p = 0.002) and 24 h sleep fragmentation (n = 7, p < 0.001) groups. The same relationship was seen when cage controls (n = 7)
Plasma corticosterone
Plasma CORT levels in rats undergoing 24 h of sleep fragmentation, sleep deprivation, and exercise control were highly variable and failed to meet the statistical assumption of homogeneity of variance (Levene = 6.556, p = .003). Therefore, the nonparametric Kruskal–Wallis test was utilized to analyze the CORT data. As can be seen in Fig. 2, an overall significant main effect of treatment was observed for all manipulations (χ2 = 12.826, p = 0.005) and a follow up with chi-square analysis indicated that
Acknowledgements
We thank John Franco for care of the animals. This research was supported by: Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Research Service Award to R.E.S., NHLBI – P50 HL060292 (R.E.S. and R.W.M.), NHLBI – T32 HL07901 (J.L.T.).
Disclosure statement: This is not an industry supported study. The authors have indicated no financial conflicts of interest.
Author contributions: J.L.T. designed and conducted the experiment, analyzed data and wrote the paper; J.W.C., S.L.G. and A.J.B. assisted in conducting
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