Dr. rer. nat. Jürgen Graf receives funding from Medical Scientist Program

Dr. rer. nat Jürgen Graf reveives funding from the Medical Scientist Program 2023 for his project entitled:
"The importance of sleep in brain development"

Abstract:

Sleep is believed to play a fundamental role in brain development but its functional and structural implications that could lead to neurological and psychological disorders when sleep is deprived during brain development is not yet understood. Within the current project we will develop and establish a mouse model with sleep deprivation during a critical period of brain development. The underlying changes in spontaneous network activity will be recorded with wide-field Ca2+ imaging and local field potential recording. Functional and structural changes after long-term sleep deprivation will be investigated by means of imaging techniques and behavioral tests. Preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit are often disturbed while sleeping. Therefore, we are aiming at establishing a method to continuously monitoring sleep states in preterm infants. This will allow us to implement a clustered care regime based on individual sleep states of the patients to improve their sleep on the neonatal intensive care unit. If a continuous sleep state classification for preterm infants was possible we could not only study the longterm improvement in the prevalence of neurological and psychological disorders when sleep conditions were improved, but also other various developmental trajectories in relation to the infants sleep.