Genetic studies of accelerometer-based sleep measures yield new insights into human sleep behaviour

Publication type

Journal Article

Authors

Publication date

April 5, 2019

Summary:

Sleep is an essential human function but its regulation is poorly understood. Using accelerometer data from 85,670 UK Biobank participants, we perform a genome-wide association study of 8 derived sleep traits representing sleep quality, quantity and timing, and validate our findings in 5,819 individuals. We identify 47 genetic associations at P < 5 × 10−8, of which 20 reach a stricter threshold of P < 8 × 10−10. These include 26 novel associations with measures of sleep quality and 10 with nocturnal sleep duration. The majority of identified variants associate with a single sleep trait, except for variants previously associated with restless legs syndrome. For sleep duration we identify a missense variant (p.Tyr727Cys) in PDE11A as the likely causal variant. As a group, sleep quality loci are enriched for serotonin processing genes. Although accelerometer-derived measures of sleep are imperfect and may be affected by restless legs syndrome, these findings provide new biological insights into sleep compared to previous efforts based on self-report sleep measures.

Published in

Nature Communications

Volume

Volume: 10:1585

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09576-1

ISSN

20411723

Subjects

Notes

Open Access

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