• Question: Do you use real brains for accurate experiments and information?

    Asked by anon-188891 to Yousef, Rachel, Petrina, Michael, Jason, Emma on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Mike Ambler

      Mike Ambler answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Hi, good question!

      I do use real brains in my experiments. I am investigating how mice hibernate (they do short periods of hibernation called torpor when they get cold and hungry). Nobody knows how hibernation works, but it is probably controlled by the brain, and so this is where I am looking. I am trying to find out which parts of the brain make the animal hibernate so that maybe we could find a drug that switches that same brain region on in humans to make them do a sort of hibernation.

      It wouldn’t be possible to understand hibernation without looking at real brain tissue and so we have to use animals. But they are very well looked after and we have to get a licence for anything we want to do before we can do it.

    • Photo: Rachel Sharman

      Rachel Sharman answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Hi,

      Awesome question. It depends on what sort of things I am looking for and how big the study is.

      To study just one person in our sleep laboratory at Oxford for one night costs £200 before we even pay the person for their time. I’m currently running an insomnia study looking at the brain changes to a therapy (cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia). This needs just 60 people. The problem with the lab is that you have to sleep with a lot of equipment on you (there is a picture of someone in our lab with sleep electrodes on their head in my profile). You always need a few nights for someone to get used to the equipment before they sleep as usual. We sometimes take the sleep kits out to people’s homes to make it more valid.

      For patients, you only really get one night to diagnose their sleep. People don’t sleep as they would at home on that first night so it’s not ideal. So, at Oxford, we work really close with bioengineering specialist who are building an EEG (how we measure sleep using electrical activity of the brain) that is like a plaster that you stick behind the ear. We are still testing these but hope they will work soon!

      For my teenager studies, I’m measuring the sleep of thousands of students around then country. It would be too expensive to use EEG to measure their brains during sleep so I use questionnaires, sleep diarys, and something called actigraphy. Actigraphy is like a watch which measures movement, light, temperature, and heart rate. From that we can make best guesses on sleep. I am currently planning a smaller study on teenagers to look at their brains while they sleep but that’s a few years away from running at the moment!

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