Skip to main content
  • Submit
  • About
    • Editorial Board
    • PNAS Staff
    • FAQ
    • Accessibility Statement
    • Rights and Permissions
    • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Journal Club
  • Subscribe
    • Subscription Rates
    • Subscriptions FAQ
    • Open Access
    • Recommend PNAS to Your Librarian
  • Log in
  • My Cart

Main menu

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Current
    • Special Feature Articles - Most Recent
    • Special Features
    • Colloquia
    • Collected Articles
    • PNAS Classics
    • List of Issues
  • Front Matter
  • News
    • For the Press
    • This Week In PNAS
    • PNAS in the News
  • Podcasts
  • Authors
    • Information for Authors
    • Editorial and Journal Policies
    • Submission Procedures
    • Fees and Licenses
  • Submit
  • About
    • Editorial Board
    • PNAS Staff
    • FAQ
    • Accessibility Statement
    • Rights and Permissions
    • Site Map
  • Contact
  • Journal Club
  • Subscribe
    • Subscription Rates
    • Subscriptions FAQ
    • Open Access
    • Recommend PNAS to Your Librarian

User menu

  • Log in
  • My Cart

Search

  • Advanced search
Home
Home

Advanced Search

  • Home
  • Articles
    • Current
    • Special Feature Articles - Most Recent
    • Special Features
    • Colloquia
    • Collected Articles
    • PNAS Classics
    • List of Issues
  • Front Matter
  • News
    • For the Press
    • This Week In PNAS
    • PNAS in the News
  • Podcasts
  • Authors
    • Information for Authors
    • Editorial and Journal Policies
    • Submission Procedures
    • Fees and Licenses

New Research In

Physical Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Physics
  • Chemistry
  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Applied Mathematics
  • Applied Physical Sciences
  • Astronomy
  • Computer Sciences
  • Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
  • Engineering
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Mathematics
  • Statistics

Social Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Anthropology
  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Economic Sciences
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Political Sciences
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
  • Social Sciences

Biological Sciences

Featured Portals

  • Sustainability Science

Articles by Topic

  • Agricultural Sciences
  • Anthropology
  • Applied Biological Sciences
  • Biochemistry
  • Biophysics and Computational Biology
  • Cell Biology
  • Developmental Biology
  • Ecology
  • Environmental Sciences
  • Evolution
  • Genetics
  • Immunology and Inflammation
  • Medical Sciences
  • Microbiology
  • Neuroscience
  • Pharmacology
  • Physiology
  • Plant Biology
  • Population Biology
  • Psychological and Cognitive Sciences
  • Sustainability Science
  • Systems Biology
Research Article

Sex differences in the circadian regulation of sleep and waking cognition in humans

Nayantara Santhi, Alpar S. Lazar, Patrick J. McCabe, June C. Lo, John A. Groeger, and Derk-Jan Dijk
PNAS first published April 18, 2016; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1521637113
Nayantara Santhi
aSurrey Sleep Research Centre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • For correspondence: n.santhi@surrey.ac.uk
Alpar S. Lazar
aSurrey Sleep Research Centre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom;
bDepartment of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Patrick J. McCabe
cSurrey Clinical Research Centre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
June C. Lo
aSurrey Sleep Research Centre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom;
dDuke-NUS Medical School, Singapore 169857, Singapore;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
John A. Groeger
aSurrey Sleep Research Centre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom;
eDepartment of Psychology, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX, United Kingdom
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
Derk-Jan Dijk
aSurrey Sleep Research Centre, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey GU2 7XH, United Kingdom;
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  1. Edited by Joseph S. Takahashi, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, and approved March 7, 2016 (received for review November 3, 2015)

  • Article
  • Figures & SI
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF
Loading

Significance

Circadian rhythms affect our physiology and psychology, in health and disease. Most of our knowledge about the human circadian timing system is based on research in men. Some circadian characteristics, such as the intrinsic frequency of the circadian clock and the amplitude of the melatonin rhythm, have been shown to differ between men and women. Whether the circadian regulation of mental functions differs between men and women is unknown. Here we show that circadian rhythmicity in mental functions exhibits sex differences so that the night-time impairment in cognitive performance is greater in women than in men. These findings are significant in view of shift-work–related cognitive deficits and disturbances of mood, which are more prevalent in women.

Abstract

The sleep–wake cycle and circadian rhythmicity both contribute to brain function, but whether this contribution differs between men and women and how it varies across cognitive domains and subjective dimensions has not been established. We examined the circadian and sleep–wake-dependent regulation of cognition in 16 men and 18 women in a forced desynchrony protocol and quantified the separate contributions of circadian phase, prior sleep, and elapsed time awake on cognition and sleep. The largest circadian effects were observed for reported sleepiness, mood, and reported effort; the effects on working memory and temporal processing were smaller. Although these effects were seen in both men and women, there were quantitative differences. The amplitude of the circadian modulation was larger in women in 11 of 39 performance measures so that their performance was more impaired in the early morning hours. Principal components analysis of the performance measures yielded three factors, accuracy, effort, and speed, which reflect core performance characteristics in a range of cognitive tasks and therefore are likely to be important for everyday performance. The largest circadian modulation was observed for effort, whereas accuracy exhibited the largest sex difference in circadian modulation. The sex differences in the circadian modulation of cognition could not be explained by sex differences in the circadian amplitude of plasma melatonin and electroencephalographic slow-wave activity. These data establish the impact of circadian rhythmicity and sex on waking cognition and have implications for understanding the regulation of brain function, cognition, and affect in shift-work, jetlag, and aging.

  • cognition
  • biological rhythms
  • gender
  • slow wave sleep
  • melatonin

Footnotes

  • ↵1N.S. and A.S.L. contributed equally to this work.

  • ↵2To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: n.santhi{at}surrey.ac.uk.
  • Author contributions: J.A.G. and D.-J.D. designed research; D.-J.D. directed the research; N.S., A.S.L., and J.C.L. performed research; J.A.G. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; N.S., A.S.L., P.J.M., and J.A.G. analyzed data; and N.S., A.S.L., P.J.M., J.A.G., and D.-J.D. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1521637113/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

View Full Text
Next
Back to top
Article Alerts
Email Article

Thank you for your interest in spreading the word on PNAS.

NOTE: We only request your email address so that the person you are recommending the page to knows that you wanted them to see it, and that it is not junk mail. We do not capture any email address.

Enter multiple addresses on separate lines or separate them with commas.
Sex differences in the circadian regulation of sleep and waking cognition in humans
(Your Name) has sent you a message from PNAS
(Your Name) thought you would like to see the PNAS web site.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Citation Tools
Circadian sex differences in sleep and cognition
Nayantara Santhi, Alpar S. Lazar, Patrick J. McCabe, June C. Lo, John A. Groeger, Derk-Jan Dijk
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2016, 201521637; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521637113

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Request Permissions
Share
Circadian sex differences in sleep and cognition
Nayantara Santhi, Alpar S. Lazar, Patrick J. McCabe, June C. Lo, John A. Groeger, Derk-Jan Dijk
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Apr 2016, 201521637; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1521637113
Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Mendeley logo Mendeley
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: 118 (8)
Current Issue

Submit

Sign up for Article Alerts

Jump to section

  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Results
    • Discussion
    • Methods
    • Acknowledgments
    • Footnotes
    • References
  • Figures & SI
  • Info & Metrics
  • PDF

You May Also be Interested in

Illustration of scientists adding bricks to a wall
Opinion: There’s a better way to address reproducibility and replicability
Scientists should pursue a strategic approach to research, focusing on the accumulation of evidence via designed sequences of studies.
Image credit: Dave Cutler (artist).
Surgeons hands during surgery
Inner Workings: Advances in infectious disease treatment promise to expand the pool of donor organs
Despite myriad challenges, clinicians see room for progress.
Image credit: Shutterstock/David Tadevosian.
Microscopic view of salmonella bacteria
Journal Club: Host defenses signal Salmonella to hijack immune cells, spur disease
Sneaky intracellular bacteria know when to defend themselves and multiply.
Image credit: Camilla Ciolli Mattioli.
Steamboat Geyser eruption.
Eruption of Steamboat Geyser
Mara Reed and Michael Manga explore why Yellowstone's Steamboat Geyser resumed erupting in 2018.
Listen
Past PodcastsSubscribe
Multi-color molecular model
Enzymatic breakdown of PET plastic
A study demonstrates how two enzymes—MHETase and PETase—work synergistically to depolymerize the plastic pollutant PET.
Image credit: Aaron McGeehan (artist).

Similar Articles

Site Logo
Powered by HighWire
  • Submit Manuscript
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • RSS Feeds
  • Email Alerts

Articles

  • Current Issue
  • Special Feature Articles – Most Recent
  • List of Issues

PNAS Portals

  • Anthropology
  • Chemistry
  • Classics
  • Front Matter
  • Physics
  • Sustainability Science
  • Teaching Resources

Information

  • Authors
  • Editorial Board
  • Reviewers
  • Librarians
  • Press
  • Site Map
  • PNAS Updates

Feedback    Privacy/Legal

Copyright © 2021 National Academy of Sciences. Online ISSN 1091-6490