ReviewMechanisms of Rapid Antidepressant Effects of Sleep Deprivation Therapy: Clock Genes and Circadian Rhythms
Section snippets
Clinical Evidence for Rapid Antidepressant Actions of Sleep Deprivation Therapy
A large number of studies in over a thousand patients during the past four decades has confirmed the efficacy of SDT in significantly reducing depressive symptoms in 40–60% of patients (3, 4, 5). The use of SDT to treat mood disorders that are frequently associated with sleep disruptions appears to be counterintuitive. Normal individuals often, but not always, experience dysphoria following prolonged sleep loss. However, the evidence for the rapid efficacy of SDT in mood disorders is highly
Circadian Rhythm Disturbances in Mood Disorders
Depression may represent an inability of the circadian clock to maintain synchrony among internal and external 24-hour rhythmic functions. Accumulating evidence detailing the circadian machinery, including the core clock genes and their products, suggests that disruption in these rhythms due to genetic or epigenetic factors may affect daily patterns of mood, sleep, hormones, neurotransmitters, and temperature.
Clock Gene Machinery
In mammals, the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), considered the master circadian clock, synchronizes rhythms throughout the body. The intracellular clock gene machinery involves complex multiple interlocking transcriptional-translational loops containing positive and negative transcription factors that adjust rhythms to an approximate 24-hour cycle (Figure 1). The core loop includes a BMAL1/CLOCK (or the paralog to CLOCK, NPAS2) heterodimer that binds to Enhancer Box (E-box) containing elements
Hypothesis
The clock gene machinery essentially regulates all body rhythms. It is hypothesized that a subset of patients with severe depression who experience circadian rhythm abnormalities, including mood, sleep, hormonal, and/or temperature regulation, have a state-related defect in clock gene machinery (Figure 2). This hypothesis is supported by the findings that chronotherapeutic treatments that alter clock gene processes, including SDT and sleep phase advance treatment, can rapidly and dramatically
Sleep Deprivation and Clock Gene Alterations in Animals
Due to the challenges associated with collecting clock gene data in humans, there is little data characterizing the effects of SDT on the circadian machinery in humans. Nonetheless, research in rodents documents the effects of sleep deprivation (SD) on circadian function in the brain. A limitation to interpreting the animal data is that these studies did not address the effects of sleep deprivation in animal models of depression. Therefore, it is important to differentiate the two bodies of
Sleep Deprivation: Effects on Other Systems
The molecular actions of sleep deprivation involve many systems in addition to clock genes. In animal studies, these include mitochondrial genes, which show significant decreases in the activity of complex I-III (44), as well as changes in chaperones, heat shock proteins, activity-dependent synaptic plasticity, immune response, and neurogenesis (45). Sleep triggers hippocampal cell neurogenesis. Sleep deprivation, in contrast, suppresses neurogenesis and neuronal progenitor cell generation (46,
Studies of the Effects of Sleep Deprivation and Sleep Deprivation Therapy on Serotonin in Animals and Man
Sleep deprivation differentially affects neurotransmitter systems, including serotoninergic, cholinergic, noradrenergic, and dopaminergic function (48, 49, 50). One of the most consistent findings comes from data showing that it enhances serotonergic function, similar to that of the actions of many antidepressant medications (51) in humans (52) and animals (53, 54). Functional polymorphisms within the promoter of the serotonin transport gene, serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic region, may
Evidence for the Role of Clock Genes in Sleep Homeostasis
Since SDT response and relapse (following recovery sleep) can rapidly decrease depressive symptoms, it is important to review evidence that sleep homeostasis and sleep timing have direct links to clock gene machinery. Clock gene rhythms and homeostasis are generated independently, but together they determine the duration, timing, and quality of wakefulness and sleep (57). Sleep deprivation therapy manipulates both homeostasis and the clock gene machinery.
Sleep homeostasis is a homeostatic
The Association of Mood Disorders with Clock Gene Variants
Accumulating evidence implicating abnormal clock gene machinery in mood disorders comes from studies documenting an association between single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in circadian genes and depression. Variants associated with MDD include RORB (rs2028122) and CRY1 (rs2287161), while variants in BPD include RORB (rs7022435, rs3750420, rs1157358, rs3903529, rs10869435) and NR1D1 (Rev-erbα) (rs2314339), DEC1 (rs1537720, rs10982664), and BMAL1 (ARNTL) (rs747601) (66, 67, 68).
SDT Provides Clues for Its Mechanisms of Action
Sleep deprivation therapy is an ideal experimental model to study mechanisms involved in rapid antidepressant actions. Although there are relatively few studies in humans, data from healthy subjects document rapid (within 24 hours) phase shifts in the core clock genes, per2 (69), cry2 (70), hormones (71), and temperature (72) in response to sleep deprivation.
We addressed the question whether sleep deprivation would affect clock genes and provide biomarkers for response. Preliminary results were
Rapid Relapse During Nap Studies in SDT Responders
In addition to relapse associated with the first night of sleep after SDT response, naps during the recovery day can produce dramatic relapses in depressive symptoms, particularly morning naps that can precipitate relapses significantly more frequently than afternoon naps (76, 77), suggesting a possible circadian component. A clinical example of the critical importance of sleep in producing a dramatic relapse after SDT is illustrated by a 49-year-old female who was severely depressed with
Sustaining Therapeutic Effects of SDT with Sleep Phase Advance, Bright Light Chronotherapies and Lithium
One of the challenges in SDT is to block relapse and sustain improvement. In 11 of 19 studies where repeated SDTs were administered in combination with lithium (79) and/or antidepressants and brief chronotherapeutic interventions, bright light and sleep phase advance successfully sustained antidepressant responses for 2 weeks up until 6 months (8). In these treatment approaches, sleep phase advance and morning bright light therapy were administered within 24 hours after SDT for a period of
Potential for Generalizing the Role of Clock Genes in SDT and Its Relevance to the Other Documented Rapid Antidepressant, Low-Dose Ketamine
In addition to SDT, only one other treatment approach, low-dose ketamine, has been shown to robustly and rapidly decrease depressive symptoms within 24 hours in 50% to 70% of patients (94, 95). We hypothesized that the rapid antidepressant effects of ketamine could also involve the modulation of clock genes and circadian rhythms similar to that proposed for SDT. Compatible with this, our recent study (96) in neuronal cell culture showed that ketamine influences BMAL1/CLOCK (NPAS2) function
Limitations
Clinical research into the mechanisms of action of SDT has been, theoretically, limited by the relative inability to blind subjects to treatment. Efforts to blind subjects have included comparisons in efficacy between the more effective late partial sleep deprivation with early partial sleep deprivation. It can be argued, however, that many mood disorder patients who have experienced severe depressive symptoms for many months rapidly and dramatically improve within 24 hours following SDT. The
Future Research
Future research is needed to identify similar and different mechanisms of the rapid antidepressant action of SDT and low-dose ketamine; investigate possible circadian rhythm or CLOCK gene abnormalities as biological risk factors for the development of depressive disorders; and determine which of the additive treatments (lithium, antidepressants, sleep phase advance therapy, and bright light therapy) are essential for blocking the first night recovery sleep relapse and sustaining the rapid
Summary
There is substantial evidence to implicate abnormal clock genes in depressive illness. This includes the rapid efficacy of SDT and consistently reported abnormal rhythms in mood disorders, which are all regulated by clock gene machinery. It is hypothesized that a mechanism of antidepressant action of SDT involves resetting abnormal circadian clock gene machinery and that the frequent severe relapse in symptoms following the recovery night sleep after improvement reactivates clock gene
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