Volume 15 Issue 2, February 2010

Many complex diseases, including depression and anxiety disorders, can be initiated by inadequate adaptation to stress. Specifically, prolonged central secretion of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) is believed to account for a number of signs and symptoms characterizing these disorders. Among the symptoms are manifold sleep disturbances, and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings characterize them by disinhibited raid eye movement (REM) sleep and a decrease of slew-wave sleep. According to a transgenic mouse model with conditional CRH overexpression, CRH accounts for these changes in sleep architecture. Both homozygous CRH-COE-Nes (CNS-specific) and -Cam (forebrain-specific) mice exhibited constantly elevated REM sleep. Representative images of a sleeping CRH-COE-Nes mouse and its EEG patterns. For more information on this topic, please refer to the article by Kimura et al. on pages 154–165.