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Obesity is a major public health problem and is associated with lack of sleep in epidemiological studies. In sleep laboratories, total sleep deprivation increased activation in the brain's reward network, but researchers have not previously addressed the effects of everyday sleep debt on brain activation.
This laboratory study enrolled 15 normal-weight healthy participants reporting an average in-home sleep time of 7.3 hours. In the extended sleep (ES) period, they were allowed to sleep freely (≤12 hours/day) for 9 days. All participants initially increased their sleep time and then decreased it to an average of 8.5 hours by the 9th night (measured with wrist actigraph and sleep diary), indicating that at baseline they had sleep debt. Subseq…