Publications by authors named "Thomas Balkin"

Background: Failure to effectively treat obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) and its symptoms is incompatible with military readiness. Continuous positive airway pressure (PAP) is the gold standard treatment for OSA, but it is impractical in austere environments. Another OSA treatment, hypoglossal nerve stimulation (HGNS), which is implanted, could have advantages for military patients but is unclear whether HGNS is efficacious.

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Society imposes work and school schedules, as well as social expectations, that militate against consistently obtaining more than 7-9 h of sleep every 24 h. For most but not all adults this sleep duration is adequate. But among those who consistently obtain more than 9 h of sleep per day ("long sleepers"), there likely exists a subpopulation of individuals who are nevertheless failing to obtain enough sleep to satisfy their physiological sleep needs - a consequence of "restricting" their daily sleep durations to whatever extent they can tolerate so as to conform as closely as possible to society's norms and expectations.

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Unlabelled: Diagnoses of military-relevant sleep disorders have increased substantially since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The cause of this increase appears to be complicated and multifactorial, with military and civilian populations clearly differing with respect to both the nature and distribution of sleep disorders diagnoses. In part, these differences may be attributable to the fact that a majority of service members are chronically sleep-restricted-an unavoidable consequence of continuous and sustained military operations that "set the stage" for development of specific sleep disorders.

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The psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) is a widely-used, minimally invasive, inexpensive, portable, and easy to administer behavioral measure of vigilance that is sensitive to sleep loss. We conducted analyses to determine the relative sensitivity of the PVT vs. the multiple sleep latency test (MSLT) and the maintenance of wakefulness test (MWT) during acute total sleep deprivation (TSD) and multiple days of sleep restriction (SR) in studies of healthy adults.

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Article Synopsis
  • * A study measured regional cerebral protein synthesis rates (rCPS) in humans during three different states: rested awake, sleep-deprived awake, and during sleep.
  • * Findings showed that rCPS was significantly higher during combined N1 and N2 sleep stages compared to N3, suggesting that these lighter sleep stages are critical for increased protein synthesis.
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Unlabelled: Scientific evidence that acute, posttrauma sleep disturbances (eg, nightmares and insomnia) can contribute significantly to the pathogenesis of trauma-induced disorders is compelling. Sleep disturbances precipitating from trauma are uniquely predictive of daytime posttrauma symptom occurrence and severity, as well as subsequent onset of mental health disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Conversely, adequate sleep during the acute posttrauma period is associated with reduced likelihood of adverse mental health outcomes.

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Background: One-third of the US population experiences sleep loss, with the potential to impair physical and cognitive performance, reduce productivity, and imperil safety during work and daily activities. Computer-based fatigue-management systems with the ability to predict the effects of sleep schedules on alertness and identify safe and effective caffeine interventions that maximize its stimulating benefits could help mitigate cognitive impairment due to limited sleep. To provide these capabilities to broad communities, we previously released 2B-Alert Web, a publicly available tool for predicting the average alertness level of a group of individuals as a function of time of day, sleep history, and caffeine consumption.

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Study Objectives: Planning effective sleep-wake schedules for civilian and military settings depends on the ability to predict the extent to which restorative sleep is likely for a specified sleep period. Here, we developed and validated two mathematical models, one for predicting sleep latency and a second for predicting sleep duration, as decision aids to predict efficacious sleep periods.

Methods: We extended the Unified Model of Performance (UMP), a well-validated mathematical model of neurobehavioral performance, to predict sleep latency and sleep duration, which vary nonlinearly as a function of the homeostatic sleep pressure and the circadian rhythm.

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The G308A gene polymorphism has been reported to influence performance impairment during total sleep deprivation (TSD). We investigated this effect in a randomized, double-blind, crossover laboratory study of repeated exposure to 48 h TSD with caffeine administration at different doses. In a retrospective analysis, we replicated the finding that the A allele of G308A, found in 4 of 12 study participants, confers resilience to performance impairment during TSD.

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Study Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to assess the extent to which sleep extension followed by sleep deprivation impacts performance on an attentional task with varying cognitive and attentional demands that influence decisions.

Methods: Task performance was assessed at baseline, after 1 week of sleep extension, and after 40 h of total sleep deprivation.

Results: One week of sleep extension resulted in improved performance, particularly for high cognitive load decisions regardless of the emotional salience of attentional distractors.

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Objective: Individuals vary in response to sleep loss: some individuals are "vulnerable" and demonstrate cognitive decrements following insufficient sleep, while others are "resistant" and maintain baseline cognitive capability. Physiological markers (e.g.

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Sleep loss is a widespread phenomenon and a public health threat. Sleep disorders, medical conditions, lifestyles, and occupational factors all contribute to insufficient sleep. Regardless of the underlying cause, insufficient sleep has well-defined consequences and the severity of said consequences partially influenced by individual characteristics.

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Objective/background: It is widely established that insufficient sleep can lead to adverse health outcomes. Paradoxically, epidemiologic research suggests that individuals who report habitual nightly sleep greater than 9 h also are at risk for adverse health outcomes. Further, studies have shown that long sleepers have decreased activity levels, which may partially explain the relationship between long sleep duration and mortality.

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Objective: To examine habitual sleep health and investigate how habitual sleep duration impacts performance and motivation in Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) tactical athletes.

Design: Observational.

Setting: A large, state university.

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Objective: To assess the effects of one week of sleep extension on mood, fatigue and subjective sleepiness in normal-sleeping young adults.

Methods: Twenty-seven adults (age 24.4±5.

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Objective: Investigate the immediate and residual impacts of sleep extension in tactical athletes.

Methods: A randomized controlled trial (Sleep extension = EXT vs Control = CON) was conducted on 50 (EXT: 20.12 ± 2.

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Introduction: Insufficient sleep increases pain sensitivity in healthy individuals. Additionally, extending sleep (eg, increasing nocturnal sleep time or adding a mid-day nap) has been shown to restore pain sensitivity to baseline levels in sleep deprived/restricted individuals. Whether sleep extension can reduce pain sensitivity beyond baseline levels in non-sleep restricted/deprived individuals remains unknown.

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Historically, scientific knowledge gaps-including a lack of information regarding the minimum amount of sleep needed to sustain nominally adequate, militarily relevant performance, and nescience of the potential impact of chronic sleep restriction on health and psychological well-being-have hindered decision-making vis-à-vis sleep/alertness management in operational environments. However, against a backdrop of increasing awareness of the importance of sleep for sustaining both performance and health, military researchers are currently doing the following: (1) developing a comprehensive, individualized sleep/alertness management system to optimize the general effectiveness of military personnel (ie, without regard to the potential relationship between sleep and specific aspects of military performance, thus sidestepping what has historically been an impediment to development of such a system); and (2) investigating the prevalence, potentially unique etiology (eg, resulting from the interaction of long-term exposure to combat-related stressors and sleep restriction), and treatment of sleep disorders and comorbidities in the military population.

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Knowing how an individual responds to sleep deprivation is a requirement for developing personalized fatigue management strategies. Here we describe and validate the 2B-Alert App, the first mobile application that progressively learns an individual's trait-like response to sleep deprivation in real time, to generate increasingly more accurate individualized predictions of alertness. We incorporated a Bayesian learning algorithm within the validated Unified Model of Performance to automatically and gradually adapt the model parameters to an individual after each psychomotor vigilance test.

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Sleep loss, which affects about one-third of the US population, can severely impair physical and neurobehavioural performance. Although caffeine, the most widely used stimulant in the world, can mitigate these effects, currently there are no tools to guide the timing and amount of caffeine consumption to optimize its benefits. In this work, we provide an optimization algorithm, suited for mobile computing platforms, to determine when and how much caffeine to consume, so as to safely maximize neurobehavioural performance at the desired time of the day, under any sleep-loss condition.

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If protein synthesis during sleep is required for sleep-dependent memory consolidation, we might expect rates of cerebral protein synthesis (rCPS) to increase during sleep in the local brain circuits that support performance on a particular task following training on that task. To measure circuit-specific brain protein synthesis during a daytime nap opportunity, we used the L-[1-(11)C]leucine positron emission tomography (PET) method with simultaneous polysomnography. We trained subjects on the visual texture discrimination task (TDT).

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Sleep quality appears to be altered by traumatic brain injury (TBI). However, whether persistent post-injury changes in sleep architecture are present is unknown and relatively unexplored. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the extent to which chronic TBI (>6 months since injury) is characterized by changes to sleep architecture.

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Objectives: To investigate the effects of caffeine on psychomotor vigilance and sleepiness during sleep restriction and following subsequent recovery sleep.

Methods: Participants were N = 48 healthy good sleepers. All participants underwent five nights of sleep satiation (time-in-bed [TIB]: 10 hours), followed by five nights of sleep restriction (TIB: 5 hours), and three nights of recovery sleep (TIB: 8 hours) in a sleep laboratory.

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Existing mathematical models for predicting neurobehavioural performance are not suited for mobile computing platforms because they cannot adapt model parameters automatically in real time to reflect individual differences in the effects of sleep loss. We used an extended Kalman filter to develop a computationally efficient algorithm that continually adapts the parameters of the recently developed Unified Model of Performance (UMP) to an individual. The algorithm accomplishes this in real time as new performance data for the individual become available.

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Emotional processing is particularly sensitive to sleep deprivation, but research on the topic has been limited and prior studies have generally evaluated only a circumscribed subset of emotion categories. Here, we evaluated the effects of one night of sleep deprivation and a night of subsequent recovery sleep on the ability to identify the six most widely agreed upon basic emotion categories (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger). Healthy adults (29 males; 25 females) classified a series of 120 standard facial expressions that were computer morphed with their most highly confusable expression counterparts to create continua of expressions that differed in discriminability between emotion categories (e.

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