Electroencephalographic markers from routine sleep discriminate individuals who are vulnerable or resilient to sleep loss

Abstract

SummarySleep loss impairs cognition; however, individuals differ in their response to sleep loss. Current methods to identify an individual's vulnerability to sleep loss involve time‐consuming sleep‐loss challenges and neurobehavioural tests. Here, we sought to identify electroencephalographic markers of sleep‐loss vulnerability obtained from routine night sleep. We retrospectively analysed four studies in which 50 healthy young adults (21 women) completed a laboratory baseline‐sleep phase followed by a sleep‐loss challenge. After classifying subjects as resilient or vulnerable to sleep loss, we extracted three electroencephalographic features from four channels during the baseline nights, evaluated the discriminatory power of these features using the first two studies (discovery), and assessed reproducibility of the results using the remaining two studies (reproducibility). In the discovery analysis, we found that, compared to resilient subjects, vulnerable subjects exhibited: (1) higher slow‐wave activity power in channel O1 (p < 0.0042, corrected for multiple comparisons) and in channels O2 and C3 (p < 0.05, uncorrected); (2) higher slow‐wave activity rise rate in channels O1 and O2 (p < 0.05, uncorrected); and (3) lower sleep spindle frequency in channels C3 and C4 (p < 0.05, uncorrected). Our reproducibility analysis confirmed the discovery results on slow‐wave activity power and slow‐wave activity rise rate, and for these two electroencephalographic features we observed consistent group‐difference trends across all four channels in both analyses. The higher slow‐wave activity power and slow‐wave activity rise rate in vulnerable individuals suggest that they have a persistently higher sleep pressure under normal rested conditions.