The Effect of Sleep on the Fast and Slow Components of the Auditory Brainstem Response: A Case Study

This study examined the effects of sleep on the slow and fast components of the auditory brainstem response (ABR) in a human subject. ABR waveforms, electroencephalogram and rectal temperature were recorded from 1 adult male during overnight sleep, and the slow and fast components of the ABR were extracted using a six-level over-complete discrete wavelet transform (OCDWT). Initial results suggested ABR wave V, and its corresponding slow and fast components, increased in latency during sleep stages 2 and 4 relative to the awake state, but autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series analyses showed these increases were best explained by decreases in body temperature. These results support suggestions that decreases in body temperature during sleep result in an increase in both synaptic transmission and axonal conduction times in the 8th cranial nerve and auditory brainstem, and that these changes are reversible.