Researchers Show How Lost Sleep Leads to Lost Neurons in Mice
uphs.upenn.edu
uphs.upenn.edu
The typical way is for them to put the mice in a position such that it's impossible for them to fall asleep without falling into water. All that this proves is that extended stress leads to lost neurons, not necessarily the sleep loss.
People often cite the "Fatal Familial Insomnia" disease as evidence of lack of sleep's ill effects, but they neglect to point out that the "insomnia" part is sometimes not observed in patients who then die anyway. So the sleep loss is apparently unrelated to the death.
There doesn't seem to be any conclusive evidence linking sleep loss to neurodegeneration. It's seemingly just something that people want to believe in absence of evidence.
I'm on an academic network, so I'm not sure if the PDF's paywalled...
From a cursory glance at the paper, this is what they had to say about how they kept the mice awake:
Mice were housed in a light/dark environment with lights on from 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. ... A previously validated, enriched, novel environment (Gompf et al., 2010) was used to promote spontaneous exploratory wakefulness. The short-term wakefulness (Sh Wake) period selected was 3 h during the lights-on period. With zeitgeber time 0 h (ZT0) referenced to the onset of the lights-on period, Sh Wake occurred at ZT8–ZT11, while extended sleep loss (Ext Wake) consisted of 8 h of continuous wake time at ZT3–ZT11 with 16 h intervals in the home cages after the first and second days of 8 h wake time.
This is a very interesting paper, but I need to analyze the specific method they used to keep mice awake. All that paragraph says is "we used a previously validated technique," with no details as to how specifically they woke the mice up.
They describe the "novel environment" starting on page 3.
"SirT3 is essential across short-term sleep loss to maintain metabolic homeostasis, but in extended wakefulness, the SirT3 response is missing. After several days of shift worker sleep patterns, LC neurons in the mice began to display reduced SirT3, increased cell death, and the mice lost 25 percent of these neurons."