Hope this lead further helps us understand the role of dopamine in bipolar disorder

Thank you for following. Really happy and proud of this study and ecstatic to see the first Markam et al. Much needed validation as a scientist.

Happy New Year :D

We also proposed a model for how the dopamine clock might be interacting with circadian clock to drive infradian sleep-wake cycle and how synchrony between the clock may explain the manic phase.

This becomes really interesting in relevance to manic bipolar patients. When their movement was recorded from the ceiling in a room, manic patients also follow more straight patterns while healthy individuals, more circumscribed (Perry W et al 2009 Arc Gen Psy)

Not only that, we put these animals into open-field test and found that they moved in more straight lines on a active day and more circumscribed patterns on an inactive day. And this seems to be unique to animals in infradian range.

We then focused on a specific infradian period of 48-hr i.e. 2-day sleep cycle and we found that sleep duration followed the 48hr rhythm.

Then we targeted the dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area using genetic tools to ablate these neurons or remove their capacity to produce dopamine and found that this prevented the mice to go to infradian sleep-wake cycle

In this study, we put the animals on running wheel for several weeks and fed them Meth in drinking water to push their sleep-wake cycles to infradian rhythms longer than a day and some animals even went to 3-days sleep-wake cycle 👀👀

Then we targeted the dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area using genetic tools to ablate these neurons or remove their capacity to produce dopamine and found that this prevented the mice to go to infradian sleep-wake cycle

In this study, we put the animals on running wheel for several weeks and fed them Meth in drinking water to push their sleep-wake cycles to infradian rhythms longer than a day and some animals even went to 3-days sleep-wake cycle 👀👀