A neural mechanism of sleep and wakefulness.pdfVIP

? 2003 Japanese Society of Sleep Research 29 REVIEW ARTICLE Sleep and Biological Rhythms 2003; 1 : 29–42 Blackwell Science, LtdOxford, UK SBRSleep and Biological Rhythms14446Japanese Society of Sleep Research 11February 2003 4 Neural mechanisms of sleep K Sakai and S Crochet 10.1046/j.1446-9235.2002.00004.x Review Article2942BEES SGML Correspondence: Dr K Sakai, INSERM U480, Université Claude Bernard, Lyon 1, 8 Avenue Rockefeller, 69373, Lyon Cedex 08, France. Email: sakai@univ-lyon1.fr Accepted for publication 7 October 2002. A neural mechanism of sleep and wakefulness Kazuya SAKAI and Sylvain CROCHET INSERM U480, Claude Bernard University, Lyon, France Abstract A current hypothesis of sleep–wake regulation proposes that a sleep process would start with the activation of sleep-promoting neurons located in the preoptic area of the anterior hypothalamus. This activation leads to the inhibition of wake-promoting neurons located in the posterior hypo- thalamus, basal forebrain and mesopontine tegmentum, which, in turn, removes inhibition from the sleep-promoting structures, thereby enhancing the sleep process. Sleep-promoting neurons are supposed to contain g -aminobutyric acid and inhibit cholinergic, noradrenergic, serotonergic or his- taminergic wake-promoting neurons at sleep onset and during sleep. By comparison with this cur- rent active hypothesis of sleep, the present mini-review gives an overview of experimental evidence supporting the old passive reticular hypothesis of sleep, indicating that sleep may result from func- tional deafferentation from the tonic ascending reticular activity, the idea of which was advanced in the last century by Kleitman, Bremer, and Moruzzi and Magoun. We propose that sleep would start with a small reduction of the activity of the lower brain stem, in particular medullary monoam- inergic and non-monoaminergic wake-active neurons, as a result of a decrease in external and inter- nal s