Disorders of Sleep and Motor Control During the Impaired Cholinergic Innervation in Rat – Relevance to Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

The medical profession has been generally very slow to acknowledge the importance of sleep medicine and sleep research. Disorders of sleep are related to anxiety, many mental and neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular and respiratory disorders, and obesity. Our knowledge of the neural substrates of sleep/wake states and sleep-related behavior disorders regulation in health and the diseases, over more than 50 years of sleep research, is based on the experiments in animal models, pharmacotherapy, and the neuropathological studies in humans. But, we still need further work in fundamental multidisciplinary and clinical research between sleep and neurodegenerative disease investigators to understand normal and abnormal sleep, and to provide new insights into preventive or disease-altering approaches for therapy. Our aim is to give an overview of our recent results related to the importance of thalamo-cortical cholinergic brain system in the disorders of sleep and motor control during sleep, with particular relevance to Parkinson’s disease.