HERITABILITY OF SLEEP HOMEOSTASIS

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Excessive daytime sleepiness is a prevalent problem in our society associated with an increased risk of vehicular crashes and industrial accidents. Sleepiness is, in part, determined by fundamental biology relating to sleep homeostasis, i.e., the rate of accumulation of the pressure for sleep during wakefulness. A differential susceptibility to sleep deprivation is reported in normal subjects with large intra-individual differences in the degree of functional impairment produced by the same duration of sleep. Genetics are likely to play an important role in sleep homeostasis as shown by recent studies in inbred mouse strains, but whether genetics plays any role in humans and, if so, the magnitude of this role, is unknown. This proposal is based on the hypothesis that sleep homeostasis is a heritable trait in humans. Given the complexity of phenotyping to study sleep homeostasis, we propose that studying differences in the variances of the phenotype between monozygotic and dizygotic twins is the optimal approach to estimate heritability of sleep homeostasis. We will assess sleep homeostasis in 80 pairs of monozygotic and 80 pairs of dizygotic twins by quantifying the increase in delta power during recovery sleep following sleep deprivation and the increase in theta power during the period of prolonged wakefulness. Subjects will be recruited using the PennTwins Cohort, a population-based cohort of about 1,800 twin pairs. If heritability of sleep homeostasis is shown, this EEG-based phenotyping strategy could not be easily applied to the larger scale population studies that will be required to assess underlying genetic variants. Thus, part of our overall strategy is to evaluate, and potentially validate, other approaches to phenotyping that are less physiologically rigorous but are more easily applied to a larger number of subjects. Therefore, as a subsidiary goal, we will also estimate heritability of performance lapses during prolonged wakefulness as a surrogate method to assess sleep homeostasis. We will particularly determine whether the differences in the measures based on our physiological intensive phenotypes between pairs of dizygotic twins are reflected in differences in this phenotyping approach that is simpler to perform. Such a result would indicate that this simpler method could be used in larger scale population studies, and will be part of future strategies to elucidate genetic variants determining sleepiness.