Time Course of Motor Activity Wake Inertia Dissipation According to Age

Abstract

The time course of motor activity sleep inertia (maSI) dissipation was recently investigated through actigraphy in an everyday life condition from middle childhood to late adulthood. Motor activity sleep inertia was dissipated in 70 min, and the sleep inertia phenomenon was more evident in younger participants than in older participants. The aim of the current secondary analysis of previously published data was to examine, within the same sample, the time course of motor activity wake inertia (maWI) dissipation, i.e., the motor pattern in the transition phase from wakefulness to sleep, according to age. To this end, an overall sample of 374 participants (215 females), ranging in age between 9 and 70 years old, was examined. Each participant was asked to wear an actigraph around their non-dominant wrist for one week. The variation in the motor activity pattern of the wake–sleep transition according to age was examined through functional linear modeling (FLM). FLM showed that motor activity wake inertia dissipated around 20 min after bedtime. Moreover, a lower age was significantly associated with greater motor activity within the last two hours of wakefulness and the first twenty minutes after bedtime. Overall, this pattern of results seems to suggest that maWI dissipation is comparable to that of maSI.

Keywords

• wake inertia
• motor activity
• actigraphy
• age