A new animal study shows that males and females have profoundly different sleep patterns. The findings shed light on what may drive differences in humans and have broad implications for preclinical research that, for decades, has focused primarily on males.
Females sleep less, wake up more often and get less restorative sleep than males, according to a new animal study by CU Boulder researchers., shed new light on what may underlie sleep differences in men and women and could have broad implications for biomedical research, which for decades has focused primarily on males.
But many of those results may have been skewed due to a lack of female representation, the study suggests. Mice are nocturnal and are"polyphasic sleepers" -- napping for a few minutes before arousing briefly to survey their environment and then resuming their slumber. Females, the study found, have even shorter bouts of sleep -- essentially, their sleep is more fragmented.
Stress hormones like cortisol and sex hormones likely play a role. For instance, women tend to report worse sleep during the time in their menstrual cycle when estrogen and progesterone are at their lowest."For me, the question is: Are we creating too much stress for ourselves because we don't sleep as much as our husband or partner and think our sleep is poor when actually that is a normal sleep profile for ourselves?" said Rowe.
Bottom line: If females are underrepresented, drugs that work best for them may seem ineffective, or side effects that hit hardest may go unnoticed. "The most surprising finding here isn't that male and female mice sleep differently. It's that no one has thoroughly shown this until now," said Rowe."We should have known this long before 2024."
Insomnia Research Staying Healthy Diseases And Conditions Mice Mating And Breeding Animals Behavioral Science
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