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Christine M. Walsh, Gina R. Poe, The Young and the Rest-less, Sleep, Volume 35, Issue 6, 1 June 2012, Pages 745–746, https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.1858
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Chronic sleep restriction is present in adolescents in many modern societies.1,2 In this issue of SLEEP, Yang and colleagues3 focused on the effects of sleep restriction in the young, day 29–44 rats, which they call adolescents-describing the effects of 7 days of sleep restriction on daily sleep patterns and performance in the Morris water maze.
Yang et al. found that performance was spared from 4-hour daily sleep restriction in adults (60–85 days old) but not in adolescents. Though total time asleep did not differ between the two age groups, both the sleep patterns and sleep quality did. Following the first day of training and sleep restriction, adult rats had an increase in the number of transitions to REM sleep from non-REM sleep (Figure 4J), an increase in the number of REM sleep episodes (Figure 4D), and a nonsignificant increase in their total REM duration by about 15 min (Figure 2C).3 Adolescent rats, however, did not increase the number of transitions to REM sleep or number of REM sleep episodes on any day (Figure 4E, G, K).3 In fact, adolescent rats suffered a net decrease in the number of REM episodes in the 60-s duration category on day 1. Both the increase in transitions to REM sleep and increase in REM sleep episodes experienced by the adults from day 1 may protect against the effects of repeated sleep restriction on learning, as sleep-state transitions may be important for learning,4 particularly the transition from non-REM sleep to REM sleep.5
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