Acute evening high-intensity interval training may attenuate the detrimental effects of sleep restriction on long-term declarative memory

Abstract

Abstract Recent evidence shows that a nap and acute exercise synergistically enhanced memory. Additionally, human-based cross-sectional studies and animal experiments suggest that physical exercise may mitigate the cognitive impairments of poor sleep quality and sleep restriction, respectively. We evaluated whether acute exercise may offset sleep restriction’s impairment of long-term declarative memory compared to average sleep alone. A total of 92 (82% females) healthy young adults (24.6 ± 4.2 years) were randomly allocated to one of four evening groups: sleep restriction only (S5, 5–6 h/night), average sleep only (S8, 8–9 h/night), high-intensity interval training (HIIT) before restricted sleep (HIITS5), or HIIT before average sleep (HIITS8). Groups either followed a 15-min remote HIIT video or rest period in the evening (7:00 p.m.) prior to encoding 80 face-name pairs. Participants completed an immediate retrieval task in the evening. The next morning a delayed retrieval task was given after their subjectively documented sleep opportunities. Long-term declarative memory performance was assessed with the discriminability index (dʹ) during the recall tasks. While our results showed that the dʹ of S8 (0.58 ± 1.37) was not significantly different from those of HIITS5 (−0.03 ± 1.64, p = 0.176) and HIITS8 (−0.20 ± 1.28, p = 0.092), there was a difference in dʹ compared to S5 (−0.35 ± 1.64, p = 0.038) at the delayed retrieval. These results suggest that the acute evening HIIT partially reduced the detrimental effects of sleep restriction on long-term declarative memory.