Reestablishment of individual sleep structure during a single 14-h recovery sleep episode after 58 h of wakefulness

Abstract

Sleep structure is highly stable within individuals but different between individuals. The present study investigated robustness of the individual sleep structure to extended total sleep deprivation. Seventeen healthy men spent a baseline night (23:00–07:00 hours), 58 h of sleep deprivation and a 14-h recovery night (17:00–07:00 hours) in the laboratory. Intraclass correlation coefficients showed that the agreement between baseline and recovery with respect to the proportion of the different sleep stages increased as a function of recovery sleep duration. High values were reached for most of the sleep stages at the end of 14 h of recovery sleep (intraclass correlation coefficients between 0.38 and 0.76). If sleep duration of the recovery night is extended to 14 h, sleep stage distribution resembles that of a baseline night underlining the robustness of the individual sleep structure.