Why do we respond differently to sleep deprivation?

Advances in genomics have resulted in a greater understanding of the variable susceptibility to and the phenotypic expression of medical disorders. Individual genetic differences result in different, and sometimes highly varied, susceptibility to the development of medical disorders, whether they are inherited or acquired. The presence of certain alleles, in the absence of a definable medical disorder, may predispose an individual to certain features of that medical disorder. In the nondisease state, alleles are probably responsible for individually different traits and are what makes each of us unique. Finally, these individual differences have been helpful in explaining the different responses to treatment, and to the development of individualized treatments.

The article by Goel et al.¹ in this issue of Neurology® explores the context of differences in response to chronic partial sleep deprivation. Specifically, they investigated differences between healthy adult subjects who were positive for a genetic biomarker for narcolepsy, the HLA DQB1*0602 allele, and those who were negative. The authors demonstrated that the presence of the DQB1*0602 allele is associated …