HERITABILITY OF SWA

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Slow-wave activity (SWA), defined as electroencephalographic spectral power in the low frequency range, is the most accurate marker of the depth or intensity sleep. We, as well as others, have found an excellent night-to-night reproducibility of SWA despite marked individual differences in young and older adults, suggesting that SWA might be a stable quantitative phenotype Furthermore, twin studies have shown that slow wave sleep (SWS), the deepest stages of non-REM sleep, is a highly heritable characteristic. We have obtained exciting preliminary findings suggesting that SWA may be a predictor of individual differences in diabetic risk, such that the ability of pancreatic beta cells to compensate for various degrees of insulin resistance may be dependent on SWA, and that experimental suppression of SWS without change in total sleep time during three consecutive nights is associated with reduced insulin sensitivity and decreased glucose tolerance in healthy young adults. Therefore, we hypothesize that SWA may be a highly heritable characteristic that could play a role in the predisposition to diabetes. The specific aims are: 1) Phenotype multiple components of sleep, including SWA, simultaneously with measures of glucose tolerance, in a recently identified large family with over 90 living members of age 18 and older, and collect the clinical and pedigree/family information needed to estimate the heritability and mode of transmission of sleep related phenotypes. 2) Examine the role of heritability of SWA in the predisposition to diabetes by conducting analyses examining the relationships between sleep and metabolic phenotypes within this large family.