Relationship between poor sleep and daytime cognitive performance in young adults with autism

Sleep, Plasticity and the Pathophysiology of Neurodevelopmental Disorders: The Potential Roles of Protein Synthesis and Other Cellular Processes

“…The nature of the sleep disturbances varies across patients, but includes decreased total sleep [29–35], increased sleep latency [26,29,36–40], more fragmented sleep/decreased sleep efficiency [36,38–42], increased stage non-rapid eye movement 1 (N1) sleep [38,40], decreased slow-wave sleep (SWS) [38,40], decreased rapid eye movement (REM) sleep latency [31,35] and decreased REM sleep [33,34,41]. …”

REM sleep and emotional face memory in typically-developing children and children with autism

“…Recent findings showed that adults with ASD had slower reaction times than neurotypically-developing adults, rather than impaired accuracy performance in a non-facial visual search task after a night's sleep (Limoges et al, 2013). The processing of neutral faces is also impaired in adults with ASD compared to their typically-developing COM counterparts, due to slower reaction times (Nacewicz et al, 2006) and diminished cortical activation (Pierce, Muller, Ambrose, Allen, & Courchesne, 2001).…”

“…Interestingly, despite a preference for local information processing (Mottron & Dawson, 2013;Mottron et al, Sleep and emotional memory in autism 4 al., 1999;Weigelt et al, 2012). Difficulties in face processing are often characterized by long reaction times in persons with ASD (Uljarevic & Hamilton, 2013), as it is the case with other types performance tasks (Hubl et al, 2003;Limoges, Bolduc, Berthiaume, Mottron, & Godbout, 2013).…”

“…Polysomnographic recordings in children with ASD have shown, however, that REM sleep time and REM density may not differ from neurotypical children while slow wave sleep (SWS) is decreased (Lambert et al, 2013;Malow et al, 2006). Limoges, Bolduc, Berthiaume, Mottron, and Godbout (2013) have A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 Sleep and emotional memory in autism 5 discerned that REM sleep correlates with daytime cognitive performance, but no such studies have been performed in children with autism.…”

Counting Sheep: Sleep Disorders in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Poor sleep among children with ASDs has been linked to symptoms associated with generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder (DeVincent et al, 2007), as well as problem behaviors in areas of socialization, sensation, communication, attention, self-stimulation, repetitive and restrictive behaviors, and self-injurious behaviors (Goldman et al, 2011;Sikora, Johnson, Clemons, & Katz, 2012). Children with an ASD and sleep problems have been found to experience more internalizing and externalizing behaviors, including more aggressive behavior (Hill et al, 2014), lower adaptive functioning (Sikora et al, 2012), and lower performance scores on sensory-motor and cognitive procedural memory tasks than do children with ASDs who do not experience sleep problems (Limoges, Bolduc, Berthiaume, Mottron, & Godbout, 2013). In fact, the total number of hours slept at night was found to be a significant predictor for both the presence and severity of core diagnostic features of autism such as problems in social interaction (Schreck, Mulick, & Smith, 2004).…”