Shorter sleep durations in adolescents reduce power density in a wide range of waking electroencephalogram frequencies.

Irwin Feinberg,Ian G Campbell

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0210649

Abstract

Despite sleep’s recognized biological importance, it has been remarkably difficult to demonstrate changes in brain physiology with reduced sleep durations. In a study of adolescents, we varied sleep durations by restricting time in bed for four nights of either 10, 8.5 or 7 h. Shorter sleep durations significantly decreased waking electroencephalogram (EEG) power in a wide range of frequencies with both eyes closed and eyes open in central and occipital leads. These findings suggest new research directions and raise the possibility that waking EEG power density could provide a non-invasive test for biologically sufficient sleep.

Highlights

One long-standing and intuitively plausible hypothesis regarding the biological function of sleep is that it is a period of reduced neural-metabolic activity that permits restoration of substrates required for waking brain functions [1]
Since NREM makes up 75–80% of human sleep after infancy, this reduced metabolic activity is consistent with the hypothesis that sleep provides or permits replenishment of energy substrates needed for waking neuronal activity
An initial analysis of the waking EEG data tested for overall effects across all 5 frequency bands. It showed that longer time in bed (TIB) was associated with higher power density (F1,76 = 83.4, p

Summary

Introduction

One long-standing and intuitively plausible hypothesis regarding the biological function of sleep is that it is a period of reduced neural-metabolic activity that permits restoration of substrates required for waking brain functions [1]. Since NREM makes up 75–80% of human sleep after infancy, this reduced metabolic activity is consistent with the hypothesis that sleep provides or permits replenishment of energy substrates needed for waking neuronal activity. We report here that graded reductions of sleep durations in adolescents reduce EEG power during waking. These findings were obtained in the course of longitudinal experiments designed to measure sleep need in adolescents

Methods

Results

Conclusion