About this Event
"Sleep and twitches in the premature infant and what they tell us about the brain "waking up" early" presented by Dr. Greta Sokoloff, Research Scientist in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa.
Friday, April 19th, 2024 | 12:00-1:00pm CT | DRC1-1005 & Zoom
ABSTRACT: We sleep the most when we are young, yet premature birth leads to an early increase in the amount of time an infant spends awake due to the abrupt change in the developmental environment as well as the infant’s own health status and need for care. Since the third trimester of gestation is a period of rapid brain growth, it is unknown if this dramatic change in behavioral state organization impacts neural development. Previous work in our lab has shown that spontaneous brain activity, in the form of spindle bursts, predominates during sleep but not wake in the early perinatal period in infant animals. Spindle bursts not only show state-dependent activity but are also reliably elicited in response to spontaneous myoclonic twitches, a hallmark of active, or rapid eye movement, sleep – as is neural activity in all sensorimotor structures we have studied to date. This strongly suggests that sleep and twitching should be protected in premature infants to promote and protect brain development. Our current study aims to see whether sleep and twitching in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and the commensurate neural activity that follows, can be used to better understand and/or predict risk for atypical development in both extremely (<32 weeks postmenstrual age (PMA)) and mildly (>32 to <37 weeks PMA) premature infants. Preliminary data suggests that from 30 to 33 weeks PMA, extremely premature infants are awake, on average, more than 30% of the time during the session. This amount of wakefulness persists at 34-36 weeks PMA and was also observed in mildly preterm infants at the same ages. When asleep, infants exhibited increased EEG power in the spindle burst range (8-25 Hz) which further increased around periods of twitching. This suggests that reductions in sleep and/or twitches may impact the amount of spontaneous activity produced by the developing brain. Ultimately, the goal of our work is to understand both short- and long-term outcomes when sleep and twitching are disrupted in preterm infants.
Iowa City native Greta Sokoloff got her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology at the University of Iowa and stuck around to get her Ph.D. in Psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Mark Blumberg. It was during her Ph.D. that Greta became motivated to develop a better understanding of developmental processes and how developing animals succeed in their appropriate developmental contexts. After obtaining her Ph.D., Greta started a postdoc at Indiana University, mentored by Dr. Joseph Steinmetz where she studied the neurobiology of learning and memory using classical conditioning. The bulk of her postdoc was spent working on the lasting effects of alcohol exposure during development on adult learning in an animal model of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. After her postdoc, Greta took a non-tenure track academic position at the University of Chicago in Dr. Abraham Palmer’s lab in the Department of Human Genetics where she worked with congenic and advanced-intercross mouse strains to study the genetics of fear and anxiety. She returned to Iowa City as a research scientist in 2011, in great part to help her aging parents. Back at the University of Iowa she once again teamed up with Blumberg as a collaborator and project wrangler in Blumberg’s Sleep and Behavioral Development Lab. Greta has been integral in the development of the human infant side of the lab and sees it as a full circle academic journey since her first contemplations on what it means for individual development to be born early started in graduate school.
This event is part of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Development and Aging (CoNDA) Center Seminar Series. To learn more about the CoNDA Center (P20GM130447), click here.
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