Extracellular adenosine in the human brain during sleep and sleep deprivation: an in vivo microdialysis study

To examine the pattern of extracellular adenosine in the human brain during sleep deprivation, sleep, and normal wake.

Following recovery from implantation of clinical depth electrodes, epilepsy patients remained awake for 40 continuous hours, followed by a recovery sleep episode.

Neurology ward at UCLA Medical Center.

Seven male epilepsy patients undergoing depth electrode localization of pharmacologically refractory seizures.

All subjects were implanted with depth electrodes, a subset of which were customized to contain microdialysis probes. Microdialysis samples were collected during normal sleep, sleep deprivation, and recovery sleep from human amygdalae (n = 8), hippocampus (n = 1), and cortex (n = 1).

In none of the probes did we observe an increase in extracellular adenosine during the sleep deprivation. There was a significant, though very small, diurnal oscillation (2.5%) in 5 of the 8 amygdalae. There was no effect of epileptogenicity on the pattern of extracellular adenosine.

Our observations, along with those in animal studies, indicate that the role of extracellular adenosine in regulating sleep pressure is not a global brain phenomenon but is likely limited to specific basal forebrain areas. Thus, if energy homeostasis is a function of sleep, an increased rate of adenosine release into the extracellular milieu of the amygdala, cortex, or hippocampus is unlikely to be a marker of such a process.