Chronic sleep curtailment, even without extended (>16-h) wakefulness, degrades human vigilance performance.

ABSTRACT: Millions of individuals routinely remain awake for more than 18 h daily, which causes performance decrements. It is unknown if these functional impairments are the result of that extended wakefulness or from the associated shortened sleep durations. We therefore examined changes in objective reaction time performance and subjective alertness in a 32-d inpatient protocol in which participants were scheduled to wakefulness durations below 16 h while on a 20-h "day," with randomization into standard sleep:wake ratio (1:2) or chronic sleep restriction (CSR) ratio (1:3.3) conditions. This protocol allowed determination of the contribution of sleep deficiency independent of extended wakefulness, since individual episodes of wakefulness in the CSR condition were only 15.33 h in duration (less tha

SUBMITTER: McHill AW 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6003377 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature