RECOVERY OF SLEEP AND NEUROBEHAVIORAL FUNCTION AFTER SLEEP LOSS

描述（由申请人提供）：睡眠不足与重大的健康风险和经济成本相关。疲劳是所有运输方式以及各种工业和医疗环境中发生事故的主要原因。关于在睡眠不足期间疲劳如何累积的研究表明，疲劳是由长时间清醒、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）共同造成的。一旦事前清醒时间超过16小时，或者在事前24小时内获得的睡眠时间减少到5-6小时，就会出现神经行为障碍：人们需要更长的时间才能做出反应，犯更多的错误，对情况的感知能力下降，沟通效率降低，做出决定和优先考虑相关信息的难度增加。虽然已经有大量的研究致力于了解疲劳积累的方式，但很少有研究系统地检查睡眠和神经行为功能在睡眠不足后的恢复。一般认为，睡眠系统和神经行为功能以相同的速度恢复。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，人们对睡眠结构（如慢波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几乎一无所知。此外，很明显，主观和客观的睡眠恢复评估之间存在显著差异。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）的恢复睡眠机会的动态，包括神经行为表现和睡眠质量和组成。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N = 26）。在实验室适应和2天的基线睡眠和表现测量后，受试者将被剥夺睡眠1晚，随后是7天/晚的恢复期。分析将集中在恢复功能的组间差异，不同任务之间的假设恢复率差异，以及恢复性睡眠的持续时间和组成与神经行为表现水平之间的关系。

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.