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Re: On the subject of "sleep debt".....

Posted by SGS on November 09, 2002 at 17:57:05:

In Reply to: Re: On the subject of "sleep debt"..... posted by Kevin (in Walla Walla) on November 08, 2002 at 12:17:48:

I would have to agree that sleep debt has been represented as some sort of accounting type function. The term itself doesn't help- it implies a one to one payback regimine like you would have if you borrowed money. This doesn't seem to be true in experiments, nor in isolated cases of extreme sleep deprivation. For instance the world record holder for staying awake had a fourteen hour sleep after his record breaking vigil. After that his sleep is reported to have basically returned to normal. So typically in these long classic sleep deprivation experiments the recovery sleep is not as long as the total sleep lost. The first night shows a predominance of Slow Wave Sleep (SWS) or Deep sleep (also known as delta sleep). The second night often shows an increase in REM. It appears that when sleep deprived the mind prefers recovery of SWS and then moves to REM recovery.

But the recovery seems to look like a mathematical recovery to an asymptote. In Randy Gardener's case this recovery was to 14 hours. Afterwhich he may have totally recovered his sleep debt even though if you counted up the hours of lost sleep they would be vastly higher than 14.

Quite how this relates to people with OSA I'm struggling with. Chronic sleep restriction or sleep fragmentation over a long period seen in middle aged people with OSA is fairly different from classic sleep deprivation experiments in young university students.

In the CPAP therapy literature it seems that, on balance, people need to be on CPAP for more than a week before they can be shown to be getting better on a range of outcome measurements. On the other hand some people report CPAP as a life changing event after only one or two nights. It's complicated by the other damage that OSA is implicated in. It may be that the sleep debt is "paid back" in less than a week in people with OSA being well controlled by CPAP, but it seems very hard to say for sure. Hope this helps some people's understanding of the sleep debt issue.

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