Clinical neurophysiology : official journal of the International Federation of Clinical Neurophysiology
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The aim of this study is to assess Auditory Arousal Thresholds (AATs) three times during an undisturbed baseline night and to compare them to AATs during the recovery night that follows two consecutive nights of selective SWS deprivation. The presence of a time-of-night effect on AATs will also be assessed. ⋯ These results confirm that AATs are a reliable index of sleep depth by showing that the SWS rebound following selective SWS deprivation is paralleled by a significant AAT enhancement. The experimental paradigm also allows us to claim that AATs show a decreasing linear trend during the night, having excluded any procedural bias. Finally, AATs can be directly related to SWS amount that preceded the awakening, although the individual correlations between AATs and SWS have to be considered with caution, given the high inter-subject variability and the small number of observations.