A study on gender and age differences in sleep spindles

Abstract

In the present work, gender differences in sleep spindle topography were examined in 40 subjects. Their median age was 32 years (range 22-49 years). Spindles were detected from 3,306,060 s of visually scored stage 2 sleep EEG by a previously validated automatic fuzzy detector at 1-second intervals. A total of 271,168 spindles were found from the six EEG channels analyzed. Females showed a significantly higher percentage of spindles in the left frontal channel than males (Fp1-A2; p = 0.026). To confirm that this difference was gender and not age related, the subjects were divided into two age groups. No significant differences in spindle activity of the frontal channels were found between the groups. However, the interindividual spindle variability seemed to be at least as large as that stemming from gender.