Researchers have developed a blood screening test which identifies signs of acute total sleep loss and chronic insufficient sleep. Blood samples were taken from 36 participants after a 40 hour period of sleep deprivation and analysed for unique biomarkers. The scientists found a subset of 68 biomarkers which allowed them to detect with 92% accuracy whether blood samples were from sleep deprived or rested participants.
Insufficient sleep poses a significant risk to our physical and mental health, and increases the risk of accidents. Such a screening tool could help to identify driver fatigue, which would be of great value in assessing cause of road traffic accidents and work place screening for industries such as mining, aviation and professional driving.
Further research is currently being conducted to identify biomarkers for chronic sleep loss to further aid in understanding of how sleep insufficiencies negatively affect health.
Article Abstract:
Acute and chronic insufficient sleep are associated with adverse health outcomes and risk of accidents. There is therefore a need for biomarkers to monitor sleep debt status. None are currently available. We applied Elastic-net and Ridge regression to entire and pre-filtered transcriptome samples collected in healthy young adults during acute total sleep deprivation and following 1 week of either chronic insufficient (< 6 h) or sufficient sleep (~8.6 h) to identify panels of mRNA biomarkers of sleep debt status. The size of identified panels ranged from 9–74 biomarkers. Panel performance, assessed by leave-one-subject-out cross-validation and independent validation, varied between sleep debt conditions. Using between-subject assessments based on one blood sample, the accuracy of classifying ‘Acute sleep loss’ was 92%, but only 57% for classifying ‘Chronic sleep insufficiency’. A reasonable accuracy for classifying ‘chronic sleep insufficiency’ could only be achieved by a within-subject comparison of blood samples. Biomarkers for sleep debt status showed little overlap with previously identified biomarkers for circadian phase. Biomarkers for acute and chronic sleep loss also showed little overlap but were associated with common functions related to the cellular stress response, such as heat shock protein activity, the unfolded protein response, protein ubiquitination and endoplasmic reticulum associated protein degradation, and apoptosis. This characteristic response of whole blood to sleep loss can further aid our understanding of how sleep insufficiencies negatively affect health. Further development of these novel biomarkers for research and clinical practice requires validation in other protocols and age groups.
Journal Reference:
Emma E Laing, Carla S Möller-Levet, Derk-Jan Dijk, Simon N Archer. Identifying and validating blood mRNA biomarkers for acute and chronic insufficient sleep in humans: a machine learning approach. Sleep, 2018; DOI: 10.1093/sleep/zsy186
