Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 3, 2025
Establishing a Device for Sleep Deprivation in Mice
Published on: September 22, 2023
Meta-analysis of sleep deprivation effects on depression in rodents
Baiqi Hu1, Chunyan Liu2, Tingting Lv3
1Department of Psychiatry, Shaoxing Seventh People's Hospital, Affiliated Mental Health Center, Medical College of Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China; Department of Behavioral Neurosciences, Science Research Center of Medical School, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, Zhejiang 312000, China; Department of Neurology, Shaoxing Hospital, China Medical University, Shaoxing, Zhejiang, China.
Objective:
To our knowledge, the relationship of sleep deprivation (SD) and depression on the rodents remains unclear. In this article, we performed a meta-analysis to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the experimental effects of SD on rodents and explore the heterogeneous factors that may be associated with outcomes.
Methods:
PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Web of Science were searched for articles before January 5th, 2022. The strains of rodents, SD method, and depression measurement tools were recorded. Standardized mean differences based on Hedge's g were calculated as measures of the effect size.
Results:
In total, 19 studies involving 51 trials were included. The overall data suggested that SD had a large effect on exacerbating depression-like behaviors, but there was high heterogeneity [-1.09 (-1.57, -0.62); I2 = 90.3%; P < 0.05]. Subgroup analysis showed that tail suspension test better reflected the effect of SD in exacerbating depression-like behavior [-3.677 (-4.758, -2.597); I2 = 56.7%; P = 0.001] than forced swimming test [-0.821 (-1.439, -0.203); I2 = 91%; P = 0.009] and sucrose preference test [-1.033 (-1.709, -0.358); I2 = 81.6%; P = 0.003].
Conclusion:
This study found that SD worsened depression-like behaviors by tail suspension test. Our results also indicated that the effects of SD on depression in rodents were related to different assessment methods, strains, SD methods and SD types.
