@article{ref1,
title="Sleep Optimizes Motor Skill in Older Adults",
journal="Journal of the American Geriatrics Society",
year="2011",
author="Tucker, Matthew and McKinley, Sophia and Stickgold, Robert",
volume="59",
number="4",
pages="603-609",
abstract="OBJECTIVES: To determine whether sleep benefits motor memory in healthy elderly adults and, if so, whether the observed sleep-related benefits are comparable with those observed in healthy young adults. DESIGN: Repeated-measures cross-over design. SETTING: Boston, Massachusetts (general community) and Harvard University. PARTICIPANTS: Sixteen healthy older and 15 healthy young participants. MEASUREMENTS: Motor sequence task (MST) performance was assessed at training and at the beginning and end of the retest session; polysomnographic sleep studies were recorded for the elderly participants. RESULTS: After 12 hours of daytime wakefulness, elderly participants showed a dramatic decline in MST performance on the first three retest trials, and only a nonsignificant improvement by the end of retest (the last 3 retest trials). In contrast, when the same participants trained in the morning but were retested 24 hours after training, after a day of wake plus a night of sleep, they maintained their performance at the beginning of retest and demonstrated a highly significant 17.4% improvement by the end of the retest session, essentially identical to the 17.3% improvement seen in young participants. These strikingly similar improvements occurred despite the presence of other age-related differences, including overall slower motor speed, a lag in the appearance of sleep-dependent improvement, and an absence of correlations between overnight improvement and sleep architecture or sleep spindle density in the elderly participants. CONCLUSION: These findings provide compelling evidence that sleep optimizes motor skill performance across the adult life span.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0002-8614",
doi="10.1111/j.1532-5415.2011.03324.x",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-5415.2011.03324.x"
}