Impact of Sleep Deprivation and Sleep Recovery on Reproductive Hormones and Testicular Oxidative Stress in Adult Male Rats

Objectives: sleep deprivation is a significant problem among adult men. It is considered to be a risk factor that contributes to several disease. It has been proposed that reactive oxygen species and the resulting oxidative stress may be responsible for some of the effects of sleep deprivation. The present study was performed to determine the impact of sleep deprivation for different periods on serum testosterone, luteinizing hormone, corticosterone and whether sleep deprivation causes oxidative stress indicated by measuring malondialdehyde (MDA) level in testicular tissue as a direct evidence of cellular damage and measuring glutathione (GSH) in testicular tissue to determine possibility of reversible nature of oxidative stress by scavenger antioxidant system. We studied also if sleep recovery after sleep loss could relieve these effects or not. Material and methods: 42 adult male albino rats aged 12 weeks weighing about 200-250 gm were used in this study. They were divided into seven groups, six animals in each group, a control group and six experimental groups. Three experimental groups were used as sleep deprivation (SD) groups and another three experimental groups were used as sleep recovery (SR) groups. The SR groups were also sleep deprived and then returned to home-cages and were allowed to undisturbed and spontaneous sleep. Group I: served as a control group. Group II: rats were subjected to sleep deprivation for one day. Group III: rats were subjected to sleep deprivation for three days. Group IV: rats were subjected to sleep deprivation for five days. Group V: rats were subjected to EBTIHAL A. ABD EL-AZIZ and DALIA G. MOSTAFA ــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــ 161 sleep deprivation for three days followed by a period of sleep recovery for one day. Group VI: rats were subjected to sleep deprivation for three days followed by a period of sleep recovery for three days. Group VII: rats were subjected to sleep deprivation for three days followed by a period of sleep recovery for five days. After each planned SD and SR period, blood samples were collected for hormonal assay. The rats were decapitated and the testes were dissected out and used for the study of malondialdehyde and glutathione. The parameters were measured then analyzed by using Student's t-test. Results: serum testosterone level and luteinizing hormone (LH) showed significant decrease after three days of deprivation. Serum corticosterone level increased significantly from the first day of deprivation in comparison with the control group. After five days of sleep recovery, serum testosterone level and corticosterone returned to the level of the control group. Serum LH level improved after three days of sleep recovery. Sleep deprivation increased the testicular tissue MDA significantly and GSH was significantly decreased after three day of sleep deprivation when comparing with the control. Sleep recovery decreased testicular tissue MDA significantly and significant increase in GSH after the fifth day as non-significant change noticed on comparing their levels on that day with the control. Conclusions: The present study demonstrated the sleep deprivation effects on testosterone, luteinizing hormone, corticosterone levels in serum, malondialdehyde and glutathione in testicular tissue of rat. Sleep recovery was associated with restoration of the serum hormone levels. Also with sleep recovery MDA level was decreased and GSH content was improved in testicular tissue.