Publications by authors named "Allison J Brager"

Resilience, the ability to overcome stressful conditions, is found in most mammals and varies significantly among individuals. A lack of resilience can lead to the development of neuropsychiatric and sleep disorders, often within the same individual. Despite extensive research into the brain mechanisms causing maladaptive behavioral-responses to stress, it is not clear why some individuals exhibit resilience.

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  • The G308A gene polymorphism affects how well people perform under total sleep deprivation (TSD) conditions.
  • In a study, participants underwent 48 hours of TSD while taking different doses of caffeine in a controlled setting.
  • The findings showed that people with the A allele of the G308A gene are more resilient to performance decline during TSD, and caffeine didn’t change this effect, indicating that the gene and caffeine work through separate mechanisms.
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Objective: We constructed research camps at single-effort ultramarathons (50 and 100 miles) in order to study human endurance capabilities under extreme sleep loss and stress. It takes > 24h, on average, to run 100 miles on minimal sleep, allowing us to construct 24h human performance profiles (HPP).

Methods: We collected performance data plotted across time (race splits) and distance (dropout rates; n=257), self-reported sleep and training patterns (n=83), and endpoint data on cardiovascular fitness/adaptation to total sleep deprivation and extreme exercise/stress (n=127).

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  • The study aimed to investigate how sleep extension followed by sleep deprivation affects performance on attention-based tasks with different cognitive demands.
  • After a week of longer sleep, participants showed improved performance, especially in tasks requiring high cognitive effort, though those who had more slow-wave sleep the night before struggled with tough decisions.
  • Sleep deprivation led to lower performance overall, particularly with cognitively demanding tasks, suggesting that those who didn't recover their sleep debt effectively were more affected by the lack of sleep.
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Objective: Individuals vary in response to sleep loss: some individuals are "vulnerable" and demonstrate cognitive decrements following insufficient sleep, while others are "resistant" and maintain baseline cognitive capability. Physiological markers (e.g.

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Burke, TM, Lisman, PJ, Maguire, K, Skeiky, L, Choynowski, JJ, CapaldiII, VF, Wilder, JN, Brager, AJ, and Dobrosielski, DA. Examination of sleep and injury among college football athletes. J Strength Cond Res 34(3): 609-616, 2020-The purpose of this study was to characterize subjective sleep metrics in collegiate football players at the start of the season, determine the relationship between preseason subjective sleep measures and in-season objective sleep characteristics, and examine the association between subjective and objective sleep metrics and incidence of time-loss injury during the competitive season.

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  • * Participants showed a tendency for delayed nap onset, longer nap duration, and improved nap efficiency during the winter months.
  • * The findings highlight the importance of napping for maintaining alertness and suggest that it should be factored into scheduling for multicultural crews in Antarctic settings.
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Objective/background: It is widely established that insufficient sleep can lead to adverse health outcomes. Paradoxically, epidemiologic research suggests that individuals who report habitual nightly sleep greater than 9 h also are at risk for adverse health outcomes. Further, studies have shown that long sleepers have decreased activity levels, which may partially explain the relationship between long sleep duration and mortality.

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The military lifestyle often includes continuous operations whether in training or deployed environments. These stressful environments present unique challenges for service members attempting to achieve consolidated, restorative sleep. The significant mental and physical derangements caused by degraded metabolic, cardiovascular, skeletomuscular, and cognitive health often result from insufficient sleep and/or circadian misalignment.

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Objective: To assess the effects of one week of sleep extension on mood, fatigue and subjective sleepiness in normal-sleeping young adults.

Methods: Twenty-seven adults (age 24.4±5.

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Introduction: Sleep loss is ubiquitous in military settings, and it can be deleterious to cognitive, physiological, and operational functioning. This is especially true in the military operational context (e.g.

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Introduction: Insufficient sleep increases pain sensitivity in healthy individuals. Additionally, extending sleep (eg, increasing nocturnal sleep time or adding a mid-day nap) has been shown to restore pain sensitivity to baseline levels in sleep deprived/restricted individuals. Whether sleep extension can reduce pain sensitivity beyond baseline levels in non-sleep restricted/deprived individuals remains unknown.

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Sleep quality appears to be altered by traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, whether persistent post-injury changes in sleep architecture are present is unknown and relatively unexplored. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the extent to which chronic TBI (>6 months since injury) is characterized by changes to sleep architecture.

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Sleep loss can severely impair the ability to perform, yet the ability to recover from sleep loss is not well understood. Sleep regulatory processes are assumed to lie exclusively within the brain mainly due to the strong behavioral manifestations of sleep. Whole-body knockout of the circadian clock gene in mice affects several aspects of sleep, however, the cells/tissues responsible are unknown.

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Brain and muscle-ARNT-like factor (Bmal1/BMAL1) is an essential transcriptional/translational factor of circadian clocks. Loss of function of Bmal1/BMAL1 is highly disruptive to physiological and behavioral processes. In light of these previous findings, we examined if transgenic overexpression of Bmal1/BMAL1 in skeletal muscle could alter metabolic processes.

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Brager, AJ and Mistovich, RJ. Game times and higher winning percentages of west coast teams of the National Football League correspond with reduced prevalence of regular season injury. J Strength Cond Res 31(2): 462-467, 2017-West coast teams of the National Football League are more statistically likely to win home night games against east coast opponents.

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Study Objectives: Episodes of brief limb ischemia (remote preconditioning) in mice induce tolerance to modeled ischemic stroke (focal brain ischemia). Since stroke outcomes are in part dependent on sleep-wake history, we sought to determine if sleep is critical for the neuroprotective effect of limb ischemia.

Methods: EEG/EMG recording electrodes were implanted in mice.

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Unlabelled: Individuals with Angelman syndrome (AS) suffer sleep disturbances that severely impair quality of life. Whether these disturbances arise from sleep or circadian clock dysfunction is currently unknown. Here, we explored the mechanistic basis for these sleep disorders in a mouse model of Angelman syndrome (Ube3a(m-/p+) mice).

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Study Objectives: Electroencephalographic slow wave activity (SWA) during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep results from the synchronous oscillation of cortical neurons and is the standard measurement of sleep homeostasis. SWA is not a direct measure of sleep pressure accumulation, but rather a measure of the NREM-sleep response to accumulated sleep pressure. Currently, no practical standard for the direct measurement of sleep pressure accumulation exists.

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Shift work and trans-time zone travel lead to insufficient sleep and numerous pathologies. Here, we examined sleep/wake dynamics during chronic exposure to environmental circadian disruption (ECD), and if chronic partial sleep loss associated with ECD influences the induction of shift-related inflammatory disorder. Sleep and wakefulness were telemetrically recorded across three months of ECD, in which the dark-phase of a light-dark cycle was advanced weekly by 6 h.

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Cocaine is a potent disruptor of photic and non-photic pathways for circadian entrainment of the master circadian clock of the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). These actions of cocaine likely involve its modulation of molecular (clock gene) components for SCN clock timekeeping. At present, however, the physiological basis of such an interaction is unclear.

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Introduction: Alcohol dependence in aging populations is seen as a public health concern, most recently because of the significant proportion of heavy drinking among "Baby Boomers." Basic animal research on the effects of aging on physiological and behavioral regulation of ethanol (EtOH) intake is sparse, since most of this research is limited to younger models of alcoholism. Here, EtOH drinking and preference were measured in groups of aged Syrian hamsters.

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