Carol Everson
Medical College of Wisconsin, WI·Physiology
Many adults regularly get too little sleep, and this habit is increasingly tied to weaker bones, fractures and osteoporosis, a disease of fragile bones. Night shift work and chronic sleep loss in middle-aged and older adults carry a fracture risk similar to long-term steroid drug use.
- Fields
Physiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
- Topics
sleep restriction
sleep deprivation
chronic sleep deficiency
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Test whether chronic sleep restriction after skeletal maturity impairs bone remodeling and increases fragility, by sleep-restricting male and female rats for 10 weeks and measuring bone strength, structure and cellular features.
- Determine whether bone damage from sleep restriction keeps progressing with age, by letting a second rat cohort sleep freely for 12 weeks afterward and comparing their bones with age-matched controls.
- Test whether sympathetic nervous system activation drives abnormal bone remodeling during sleep loss, using surgical removal of nerve supply to one hind limb with the other limb as a paired control.
- Assess whether blocking beta-adrenergic receptors, which receive stress-nerve signals on bone cells, prevents sleep-loss bone changes, measured by static and dynamic histomorphometry of bone formation and breakdown.
More about the research
Still, how missing sleep damages the adult skeleton is not understood. The lab's earlier work in young male rats found that chronic sleep restriction caused marked bone thinning and lower bone mineral density, and these effects did not fully reverse after normal sleep returned.
Why it matters
Osteoporosis affects millions of U.S. men and women and can lead to fractures, lost independence and early death. Both short sleep and fractures are common and can be changed. By showing how chronic sleep loss alters bone structure, and whether stress-nerve signaling is responsible, this work could lay groundwork for treatments or sleep-based strategies to reduce age-related bone loss and fracture risk.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Kentucky, KY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether women with low-turnover, age-related osteoporosis gain more bone mineral density over one year on teriparatide, a bone-building drug, than on standard alendronate, using a randomized comparison and DXA bone scans.
Erica Scheller
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Physiology
Define how fat breakdown in constitutive bone marrow adipocytes supports osteoblast bone formation during high sympathetic nerve activity, and test whether this protection persists in aged and post-menopausal states.
Urszula Iwaniec
Oregon State University, OR·Physiology
Measure bone mass, density, microarchitecture and turnover in iliac crest biopsies from male and female rhesus macaques given free access to alcohol for 7 or 15 months.
The school
Medical College of Wisconsin: 17 labs on PI Pages, $360M a year on research, 44 research doctorates a year.
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