Therapeutic Sleep for Traumatic Brain Injury

This proposal will test the hypothesis that correcting sleep disorders can have a therapeutic effect on Traumatic Brain Injury TBI The majority of TBI patients develop sleep disorders, a correlation that is extremely prevalent in military personnel. Here, we have developed a paradigm to induce TBI in Drosophila. TBI induction results in increased mortality, impaired climbing behavior, decreasedfragmented sleep, cell death and altered gene expression in glia cells, including a strong innate immune response. We are currently testing whether sleep induction can restore these impairments, following promising pilot data showing that pharmacological sleep induction after TBI increases mortality while pharmacological wake induction decreases mortality.