The impact of experimentally-induced insomnia-like symptoms on interleukin-6 and lymphocyte subsets

睡眠对有效的免疫功能很重要。失眠等睡眠障碍在现代社会非常普遍，并与健康状况受损和免疫参数变化有关。然而，目前尚不清楚失眠患者报告的免疫变化是否确实是由睡眠模式紊乱引起的。针对睡眠中断对免疫功能影响的实验研究大多采用完全剥夺睡眠或每晚睡眠限制为几个小时的方法，这并不能充分模仿失眠的典型睡眠模式。在概述的项目中，我们的目标是通过采用17天的住院睡眠中断方案来模拟失眠症状，分析实验诱导的健康人类失眠样症状对免疫参数的影响。该方案包括9晚睡眠延迟，频繁夜间醒来和清晨醒来，这是失眠患者的典型特征，并被设计为受试者内研究，还包括不受干扰睡眠的住院对照组。有了这个模型，我们想探索失眠期间的免疫变化，如白细胞介素-6水平的增加和淋巴细胞数量的减少，是否确实与睡眠模式中断有因果关系。此外，应用的方案包括几个周期的睡眠中断和睡眠恢复之夜，以分析免疫变化的时间过程，并确定免疫系统是否能够适应反复的扰动。这将进一步深入了解生物系统对反复挑战的潜在可塑性。

Sleep is important for effective immune functions. Sleep disturbances like insomnia are highly prevalent in modern society and are associated with impaired health status and changes in immune parameters. However, it is not known whether the reported immune changes in patients with insomnia are indeed caused by the disturbed sleep patterns. Experimental studies addressing the impact of sleep disruptions on immune functions mostly employ total sleep deprivation or sleep restriction to a couple of hours per night, which does not adequately mimic sleep patterns typical for insomnia. In the outlined project, we aim to analyze the impact of experimentally-induced insomnia-like symptoms in healthy humans on immune parameters by employing a 17-day in-hospital sleep disruption protocol that models insomnia symptoms. The protocol includes 9 nights with delayed sleep onset, frequent nocturnal awakenings and early morning awakening, which is typical for patients with insomnia, and is designed as within-subject study also comprising an in-hospital control arm with undisturbed sleep. With this model, we want to explore whether immune changes seen during insomnia, like increases in interleukin-6 levels and reductions in lymphocyte numbers, are indeed causally related to the disrupted sleep patterns. In addition, the applied protocol includes several cycles of disrupted sleep and sleep recovery nights to analyze the time course of the immune changes and determine whether the immune system is able to adapt to repeated perturbations. This will give further insights into the potential plasticity of biological systems to recurrent challenges.