Association between depressive symptoms and sleep neurophysiology in early adolescence

Abstract

Background: Depression is highly prevalent among adolescents, and depressive symptoms rise rapidly during early adolescence. Depression is often accompanied by subjective sleep complaints and alterations in sleep neurophysiology. In this study, we examine whether depressive symptoms, measured on a continuum, are associated with subjective and objective (sleep architecture and neurophysiology) measures of sleep in early adolescence. Methods: High-density sleep EEG, actigraphy, and self-reported sleep were measured in 52 early adolescents (12.31 years; SD: 1.121; 25 female). Depressive symptoms were measured on a continuum using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). The association between depressive symptoms and 2 weeks of actigraphy, selfreported sleep, sleep architecture, and sleep neurophysiology (slow wave activity and sigma power) was determined via multiple linear regression with factors age, sex, and pubertal status. Results: Despite no association between polysomnography measures of sleep quality and depressive symptoms, individuals with more depressive symptoms manifested worse actigraphically measured sleep. Less sleep spindle activity, as reflected in nonrapid eye movement sleep sigma power, was associated with more depressive symptoms over a large cluster encompassing temporal, parietal, and occipital regions. Furthermore, worse subjectively reported sleep quality was also associated with less sigma power over these same areas. Puberty, age, and sex did not impact this association. Conclusions: Sleep spindles have been hypothesized to protect sleep against environmental disturbances. Thus, diminished spindle power may be a subtle sign of disrupted sleep and its association with depressive symptoms in early adolescence may signal vulnerability for depression.It is known that sleep and depression are intimately linked. We examine sleep in a multimodal manner (2 weeks of objective sleep measurements via actigraphy, sleep neurophysiology measured via EEG, and self-reported sleep).By measuring the association between all indices of sleep and depressive symptoms measured on a continuum, we can draw conclusions about a neurobiological continuum.We show that sleep spindles, a measure of thalamocortical function, are incrementally associated with depressive symptoms.Clinical implication: We find an association between self-reported and actigraphically measured sleep over several weeks, but no association with EEG measures of sleep quality. This suggests that clinicians should measure sleep over longer periods with actigraphy to determine whether sleep problems are present.

Polygenic impact of morningness on the overnight dynamics of sleep spindle amplitude

“…Another interesting perspective related to the association observed between higher slow spindle activity along with a higher PGS for morningness is related to the well‐documented association between morningness and a lower risk for mental health problems. Together with the reports showing deficits in spindle activity in psychiatric conditions, such as depression and schizophrenia, the current findings open up new hypotheses of their common genetic pathways. In our recent study in the same adolescent cohort as reported here, we showed that fast sleep spindle amplitude and density were associated with a PGS for schizophrenia, and slow sleep spindle duration and amplitude with the CACNA1l gene variants .…”

“…They also show significant heritablity . Many psychiatric conditions, such as depression and schizophrenia, have been associated with deficits in sleep spindle activity, assumed to reflect reduced brain plasticity and vulnerability for sleep disturbance.…”

Objectively measured sleep duration, sleep quality, and symptoms of psychopathology in the SIGMA cohort

“…Our findings diverge from large-scale selfreport studies, reporting associations between both short and long sleep duration and risk for symptoms of psychoticism (Morishima et al, 2020), depression, and anxiety (Ojio et al, 2016) in the general population of adolescents. As in our confirmatory analyses, these contrasting findings between self-report and objectively-measured could be a function of the differential reliability of subjective and objective measures (Matthews et al, 2018) or differing measurement periods (Hamann et al, 2019;Slykerman et al, 2019), suggests that future research should explore the effects of different measurement periods in relation to study outcomes.…”

“…However, the effect size was small (.06), suggesting only a weak association. This finding is in contrast to significant negative associations in a small accelerometry study (Hamann et al, 2019) and self-report studies (Kaneita et al, 2009;Raniti et al, 2017). Similar to the findings in general psychopathology, it remains challenging to fully interpret these findings, as we do not know how the sleep quality index was calculated by Fitbit.…”

The Effects of Daytime Psilocybin Administration on Sleep: Implications for Antidepressant Action

“…Although these differences did not remain significant after correction for multiple comparisons and could be associated with the decrease of SWA (Andrillon et al, 2011) in the present study, future research on larger samples is warranted. Sigma activity has been associated with sleep spindles which are believed to play an important role in sleep maintenance protection as well as in memory consolidation, synaptic plasticity (Astori et al, 2013), and depression (Nishida et al, 2016;Sesso et al, 2017;Hamann et al, 2019).…”