RECOVERY OF SLEEP AND NEUROBEHAVIORAL FUNCTION AFTER SLEEP LOSS

描述(由申请者提供)：睡眠不足与严重的健康风险和经济成本有关。疲劳是各种交通方式以及各种工业和医疗环境中事故的主要诱因。关于如何在睡眠不足期间积累疲劳的研究表明，疲劳是由长时间的清醒、恢复性睡眠不足以及将工作转移到不利于警觉行为的时间(例如夜间、清晨)造成的。一旦之前的觉醒超过约16小时和/或在之前24小时内获得的睡眠减少到5-6小时以下，就会发生神经行为障碍：人们需要更长的时间才能做出反应，犯更多的错误，降低情景意识，降低沟通效率，并增加做出决策和确定相关信息优先顺序的困难。虽然人们在了解疲劳积累的方式方面做出了重大努力，但很少有研究系统地研究睡眠恢复和神经行为功能对睡眠缺失的反应。人们通常认为睡眠系统和神经行为功能的恢复速度是一样的。然而，最近的研究挑战了这一假设。重要的是，这些研究还表明，人们几乎不了解睡眠结构(例如，慢波睡眠和快速眼动睡眠的时间和持续时间)与神经行为功能恢复的关系。此外，很明显，主观评估和客观评估之间存在着显著的差异。这项拟议的研究将评估一晚睡眠不足对神经行为的影响，然后评估不同持续时间(3、6和9小时)恢复睡眠机会的动态，包括神经行为表现以及睡眠质量和组成。总共104名受试者将被随机分配到对照组或三个恢复组中的一个(每组26人)。在实验室适应和两天的基线睡眠和表现测量之后，受试者将被剥夺一晚的睡眠，随后将恢复7个白天/夜晚。分析将侧重于恢复功能的群体差异，不同任务之间假设的不同恢复率，以及一方面恢复睡眠的持续时间和组成与神经行为表现水平之间的关系。 这项研究将是系统地确定中度失眠后神经行为功能恢复率的关键的第一步。同样重要的是，这项研究将进一步加深我们对调节睡眠、疲劳和神经行为功能的体内平衡和昼夜节律过程的理解。睡眠不足是所有交通方式以及各种工业和医疗环境中发生事故的主要原因。然而，人们对这种失眠的恢复过程知之甚少。这项研究是系统地确定急性睡眠剥夺后清醒功能如何以及以多快的速度恢复到正常水平的关键的第一步。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Sleep loss is associated with significant health risks and financial cost. Fatigue is a major contributor to accidents in all transportation modalities and in a wide range of industrial and medical settings. Research on how fatigue accumulates during sleep loss indicates that it is caused by a combination of extended periods of wakefulness, inadequate restorative sleep, and the displacement of work to times that are not conducive to alert behavior (e.g. night hours, early mornings). Once prior wake extends beyond about 16 hours and/or sleep obtained in the prior 24-hour period is reduced below 5-6 hours, neurobehavioral impairment occurs: people take longer to respond, make more errors, have reduced situational awareness, communicate less effectively, and have increased difficulty making decisions and prioritizing relevant information. While there has been a significant effort directed toward understanding the manner in which fatigue accumulates, remarkably few studies have examined systematically the recovery of sleep and neurobehavioral function in response to sleep loss. It is generally assumed that the sleep system and neurobehavioral function recover at the same rate. Yet, recent research challenges this assumption. Importantly, these studies also demonstrate that there is virtually no understanding of how sleep architecture (e.g. timing and duration of slow wave and rapid eye movement sleep) is related to recovery of neurobehavioral function. Further, it is clear that there is a significant discrepancy between subjective and objective assessments of recovery from sleep loss. The proposed study will evaluate the neurobehavioral effects of one night of sleep loss, then assess the dynamics of varying duration (3, 6 and 9 hours) of recovery sleep opportunities, in terms of both neurobehavioral performance and sleep quality and composition. A total of 104 subjects will be randomly assigned to a control, or one of three recovery groups (N = 26 per group). Following laboratory adaptation and 2 days of baseline sleep and performance measurements, subjects will be deprived of sleep for one night, followed by 7 recovery days/nights. Analyses will focus on group differences in the recovery functions, on hypothesized differential rates of recovery across tasks, and on relationships between the duration and composition of recovery sleep on one hand and neurobehavioral performance levels on the other. This study will be a critical first step toward systematically determining the rate of recovery of neurobehavioral functions following moderate sleep loss. Equally important, the study will further our understanding of the homeostatic and circadian processes that regulate sleep, fatigue, and neurobehavioral functioning. Sleep loss is a major contributor to accidents in all transportation modalities and in a wide range of industrial and medical settings. Yet, little is known about processes involved in recovery from such sleep loss. This study represents a critical first step toward systematically determining how, and at what rate, waking function returns to normal levels following acute sleep deprivation.