Meta-analysis of sleep deprivation effects on depression in rodents

•We provide an evaluation of the experimental SD effects on depression in rodents.•We explore the heterogeneous factors that may be associated with outcomes (eg. strains, test method).•We found that SD worsened depression-like behaviors by tail suspension test. To our knowledge, the relationship of sleep deprivation (SD) and depression on the rodents remains unclear. In this article, we performed a meta-analysis to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the experimental effects of SD on rodents and explore the heterogeneous factors that may be associated with outcomes. PubMed, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and Web of Science were searched for articles before January 5th, 2022. The strains of rodents, SD method, and depression measurement tools were recorded. Standardized mean differences based on Hedge’s g were calculated as measures of the effect size. In total, 19 studies involving 51 trials were included. The overall data suggested that SD had a large effect on exacerbating depression-like behaviors, but there was high heterogeneity [-1.09 (−1.57, −0.62); I2 = 90.3%; P