Journal of sleep research
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Journal of sleep research · Jun 2007
Trait interindividual differences in the sleep physiology of healthy young adults.
Despite decades of sleep research by means of polysomnography (PSG), systematic interindividual differences in PSG-assessed sleep parameters have been scarcely investigated. The present study is the first to quantify interindividual variability in standard PSG-assessed variables of sleep structure in terms of stability and robustness as well as magnitude. Twenty-one carefully screened healthy young adults were studied continuously in a strictly controlled laboratory environment, where their PSGs were recorded for eight nights interspersed with three separate 36 h sleep deprivation periods. ⋯ Notably, for non-REM delta power--a putative marker of sleep homeostasis--the interindividual differences were from 9.9 to 12.8 times greater than the group-average increase following sleep deprivation relative to baseline. Physiologic sleep variables did not vary among subjects in a completely independent manner--61.1% of their combined variance clustered in three trait dimensions, which appeared to represent sleep duration, sleep intensity, and sleep discontinuity. Any independent functional significance of these sleep physiologic phenotypes remains to be determined.