RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Dopamine-gated memory selection during slow wave sleep
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.05.23.112375
DO 10.1101/2020.05.23.112375
A1 Hanna Isotalus
A1 Will J Carr
A1 George G Averill
A1 Oliver Radtke
A1 James Selwood
A1 Rachel Williams
A1 Elizabeth Ford
A1 Liz McCullagh
A1 James McErlane
A1 Cian O’Donnell
A1 Claire Durant
A1 Ullrich Bartsch
A1 Matt W Jones
A1 Carlos Muñoz-Neira
A1 Alfie R Wearn
A1 John P Grogan
A1 Elizabeth J Coulthard
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/31/2020.05.23.112375.abstract
AB The human brain selectively stores knowledge of the world to optimise future behaviour, automatically rehearsing, contextualising or discarding information to create a robust record of experiences. Storage or forgetting evolves over time, particularly during sleep. We have previously shown that dopamine given in the form of L-DOPA tablets improves long-term memory in Parkinson’s disease, but only when given overnight. L-DOPA is already prescribed widely with a good safety profile and could potentially be rapidly repurposed to improve cognitive performance and improve quality of life in, for example, early Alzheimer’s Disease, if we understood the best time of day to prescribe. Therefore, we sought to test how dopamine shaped long-term memory formation before and during sleep in a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled cross-over trial of healthy older adults (n = 35). We administered L-DOPA after word-list learning to be active during repeat exposure to a proportion of the words and during subsequent nocturnal sleep. Nocturnal dopamine accelerated forgetting for words presented once but it did not affect memory for words presented twice. During slow wave sleep, L-DOPA also increased spindle amplitude around slow oscillation peaks. Larger dopamine-induced difference in word memory was associated with a larger increase in spindle amplitude. Dopamine-dependent memory processing may therefore modulate spindles dependent on slow-oscillation phase. Further, overnight dopamine increased total slow wave sleep duration by approximately 11%. This pharmaceutical modification of slow wave sleep may have potential health-enhancing benefits in old age that could include cognitive enhancement and Alzheimer’s prevention.One Sentence Summary Dopamine before sleep promotes forgetting of weak memory traces associated with increased spindle amplitude around the peak of a slow oscillations.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.