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Sleep and memory processing impairments range from mild to severe in the psychosis spectrum. Relationships between memory processing and sleep characteristics have been described for schizophrenia, including unaffected first-degree relatives, but they are less clear across other high-risk groups within the psychosis spectrum. In this study, we investigated high-risk individuals with accumulated risk-factors for psychosis and subthreshold symptoms. Out of 1898 screened individuals, 44 age- and sex-matched participants were sub-grouped into those with substantial environmental risk factors for psychosis and subthreshold psychotic symptoms (high-risk group) and those without these phenotypes (low-risk controls). Four groups (high/low risk, morning/evening training) were trained and tested in the laboratory for sustained attention, motor skill memory (finger-tapping task) and declarative memory (word-pair learning task) immediately after training, again after a night of EEG-recorded sleep at home or a period of daytime wakefulness, and again after 24 h from training. No differences in sustained attention or in memory consolidation of declarative and motor skill memory were found between groups for any time period tested. However, a group difference was found for rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep in relation to motor skill memory: the longer the total sleep time, particularly longer REM sleep, the greater the performance gain, which occurred only in high-risk individuals. In conclusion, our results suggest a gain in motor skill performance with sufficient sleep opportunity for longer REM sleep in high-risk individuals with subthreshold psychotic symptoms. Declarative memory did not benefit from sleep consolidation above or beyond that of the control group.

Original publication

DOI

10.1016/j.nlm.2020.107273

Type

Journal article

Journal

Neurobiol Learn Mem

Publication Date

10/2020

Volume

174

Keywords

Declarative, Memory consolidation, Motor skill, Psychosis, Risk factors, Sleep