The Fingerprint-Like Pattern of Nocturnal Brain Activity Demonstrated in Young Individuals is Also Present in Senior...

The quantitative sleep EEG has been considered as electroencephalographic "fingerprint", ie, it is stable within but differs between individuals. So far, however, almost all studies addressing this aspect have been conducted in young men. It was therefore of interest to know whether the sleep EEG fingerprint concept holds true in older samples of both sexes.

Data from three different subsamples of 30 healthy individuals each were reused for the present secondary analysis (young men (YM) = 25.6 ± 2.4 years, elderly men (EM) = 69.1 ± 5.5 years, elderly women (EW) = 67.8 ± 5.7 years). Individuals slept ten times in the sleep laboratory, resulting in a total of 900 study nights. However, to avoid misinterpretation due to intervention-related changes in sleep EEG power spectra, only the 3 sham nights without any intervention were included, reducing the datasets to 270. To determine stability of NREM sleep EEG power spectra between sham night pairs, within- and between-subject Manhattan distance measures were computed separately by sample.

Regardless of subsample and sham night pair, lowest distance measures, ie, largest similarity, were observed for within-subject power spectra comparisons (range of mean distance measures for EW from 3.82 to 4.06, for EM from 3.55 to 3.63, and for YM from 3.04 to 3.62). Moreover, intraindividual similarity did not differ substantially between samples. Between-subject power spectra distance measures were considerably larger (range of mean distance measures for EW from 12.95 to 13.15, for EM from 12.21 to 12.57, and for YM from 10.33 to 10.78) and varied significantly between young and elderly individuals.

The present results support the view that the sleep EEG power spectrum is an individual trait-like characteristic that remains unique up until old age. This finding may help to increase the sensitivity in measuring intervention effects.