SLEEP - Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins

VOLUME 35, ISSUE 09

HERITABILITY OF PERFORMANCE DEFICIT FROM SLEEP DEPRIVATION IN TWINS
Heritability of Performance Deficit Accumulation During Acute Sleep Deprivation in Twins

http://dx.doi.org/10.5665/sleep.2074

Samuel T. Kuna, MD¹^,²; Greg Maislin, MS, MA¹; Frances M. Pack, RN. CCRC¹; Bethany Staley, RPSGT¹; Robert Hachadoorian¹; Emil F. Coccaro, MD³; Allan I. Pack, MB, ChB, PhD¹

¹Department of Medicine and Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; ²Department of Medicine, Philadelphia VA Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA; ³Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Table of Contents

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Study Objectives:

To determine if the large and highly reproducible interindividual differences in rates of performance deficit accumulation during sleep deprivation, as determined by the number of lapses on a sustained reaction time test, the Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT), arise from a heritable trait.

Design:

Prospective, observational cohort study.

Setting:

Academic medical center.

Participants:

There were 59 monozygotic (mean age 29.2 ± 6.8 [SD] yr; 15 male and 44 female pairs) and 41 dizygotic (mean age 26.6 ± 7.6 yr; 15 male and 26 female pairs) same-sex twin pairs with a normal polysomnogram.

Interventions:

Thirty-eight hr of monitored, continuous sleep deprivation.

Measurements and Results:

Patients performed the 10-min PVT every 2 hr during the sleep deprivation protocol. The primary outcome was change from baseline in square root transformed total lapses (response time ≥ 500 ms) per trial. Patient-specific linear rates of performance deficit accumulation were separated from circadian effects using multiple linear regression. Using the classic approach to assess heritability, the intraclass correlation coefficients for accumulating deficits resulted in a broad sense heritability (h²) estimate of 0.834. The mean within-pair and among-pair heritability estimates determined by analysis of variance-based methods was 0.715. When variance components of mixed-effect multilevel models were estimated by maximum likelihood estimation and used to determine the proportions of phenotypic variance explained by genetic and nongenetic factors, 51.1% (standard error = 8.4%, P < 0.0001) of twin variance was attributed to combined additive and dominance genetic effects.

Conclusion:

Genetic factors explain a large fraction of interindividual variance among rates of performance deficit accumulations on PVT during sleep deprivation.

Citation:

Kuna ST; Maislin G; Pack FM; Staley B; Hachadoorian R; Coccaro EF; Pack AI. Heritability of performance deficit accumulation during acute sleep deprivation in twins. SLEEP 2012;35(9):1223-1233.