0171 EEG Markers from Routine Sleep Discriminate Individuals Who Are Vulnerable or Resilient to Sleep Loss

Abstract Introduction Sleep loss is widespread among civilians and military personnel, and is often unavoidable due to family or work obligations. Although sleep loss impairs cognition, individuals differ in the extent of these impairments. Identifying these phenotypical variations between individuals offers the opportunity to assign individuals who are resilient to sleep loss to tasks that require sustained vigilance, and to provide sleep-loss countermeasures to individuals who are more vulnerable. Current methods to identify an individual’s phenotypical response to sleep deprivation require time-consuming sleep-loss challenges. Here, we sought a more practical approach to label individuals as resilient or vulnerable to sleep loss by identifying electroencephalographic (EEG) markers obtained from routine night sleep. Methods We retrospectively analyzed four studies in which 49 healthy young adults (18 women) completed a laboratory baseline-sleep phase followed by a sleep-loss challenge. After classifying subjects as resilient or vulnerable to sleep loss based on psychomotor vigilance test performance, we extracted three EEG features from four channels during the baseline nights, evaluated the discriminatory power of these features using the first two studies (discovery), and assessed reproducibility of the results using the remaining two studies (reproducibility). Results In the discovery analysis, we found that, compared to resilient subjects, vulnerable subjects exhibited 1) higher slow wave activity (SWA) power in channels O1, O2, and C3; 2) higher SWA rise rate in channels O1 and O2; and 3) lower sleep spindle frequency in channel C4. Our reproducibility analysis confirmed the discovery results on SWA power and SWA rise rate, and for all three EEG features we observed consistent group-difference trends across all four channels in both analyses. Conclusion The higher SWA power and SWA rise rate in vulnerable individuals suggest that they have a higher accumulated sleep pressure under normal rested conditions, and allowed us to identify individuals who are resilient or vulnerable to sleep loss. Support (if any) This work was sponsored by the Military Operational Medicine Program Area Directorate of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC), Fort Detrick, MD. The Henry M. Jackson Foundation was supported by the USAMRDC under Contract No. W81XWH20C0031.