Achievement

Evidence suggests that brain regions that have been disproportionately used during waking will require a greater intensity and/or duration of sleep. We explored two physiological markers of use-dependent sleep: a change in the size and shape of an electrical evoked response, and an evoked change in blood volume and oxygenation delivered to activated tissue. Both markers provide a means to investigate physiological mechanisms for the distributed homeostatic regulation of sleep and yield insights into the consequences of sleep loss on waking brain function. In this past year we designed a non-invasive imaging method of monitoring this mechanism to study the effect of aging on sleep quality and its impacts on functional performance. We are currently evaluating the relationship between age, sleep quality, and brain vascular health but performing brain imaging assessment and cognitive assessment on a set of 10 younger adults and 10 healthy older adults.