Slow wave sleep and accelerated forgetting

Atherton, Kathryn E, Nobre, Anna C, Lazar, Alpar S, Wulff, Katharina, Whittaker, Roger G, Dhawan, Vandana, Lazar, Zsolt I, Zeman, Adam Z and Butler, Christopher R (2016) Slow wave sleep and accelerated forgetting. Cortex, 84. pp. 80-89. ISSN 0010-9452

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Abstract

We investigated whether the benefit of slow wave sleep (SWS) for memory consolidation typically observed in healthy individuals is disrupted in people with accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF) due to epilepsy. SWS is thought to play an active role in declarative memory in healthy individuals and, furthermore, electrographic epileptiform activity is often more prevalent during SWS than during wakefulness or other sleep stages. We studied the relationship between SWS and the benefit of sleep for memory retention using a word-pair associates task. In both the ALF and the healthy control groups, sleep conferred a memory benefit. However, the relationship between the amount of SWS and sleep-related memory benefits differed significantly between the groups. In healthy participants, the amount of SWS correlated positively with sleep-related memory benefits. In stark contrast, the more SWS, the smaller the sleep-related memory benefit in the ALF group. Therefore, contrary to its role in healthy people, SWS-associated brain activity appears to be deleterious for memory in patients with ALF.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > School of Health Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Groups > Dementia & Complexity in Later Life Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences > Research Centres > Lifespan Health
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	07 Dec 2016 00:06
Last Modified:	19 Oct 2023 01:52
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/61602
DOI:	10.1016/j.cortex.2016.08.013

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