Structural Alterations in Large-scale Brain Networks and Their Relationship with Sleep Disturbances in the Adolescent Population

Abstract

Although sleep disturbances are highly prevalent in adolescents, neuroimaging evidence on the effects of sleep disturbances on their developing brains remains limited. Therefore, we explored gray matter volumes (GMVs) at the whole-brain level and investigated their relationship to sleep disturbances in a sample of Korean adolescents in the general population. We recruited participants from one middle school and high school. All participants and their legal guardians gave informed consent before participating in our study. We used component 5 of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index to measure sleep disturbances and conducted a voxel-based morphometry-DARTEL procedure to measure GMVs. We performed partial correlation analyses to examine whether the GMVs were associated with sleep disturbances. A total of 56 adolescents participated in this study. Our results revealed that GMVs in multiple global regions were negatively correlated with sleep disturbances. Moreover, most of these identified regions belong to large-scale brain networks categorized by functional neuroimaging studies. We found an association between regional GMVs in multiple global regions involved in large-scale networks and the severity of sleep disturbances in the adolescent population. Based on this evidence and previous neuroimaging evidence, we suggest that structural alterations in the networks may be linked to sleep disturbances. Sleep disturbances and their harmful effects have been increasingly reported in many children and adolescents worldwide 1. In a representative sample of 17,102 children and adolescents, approximately 20% reported sleep disturbances and an additional 13% reported difficulties falling asleep 1. Similarly, 38% of 1,000 school going adolescents suffered from sleep disturbances 2. A recent population-based study reported that 26% of 1,180 Brazilian children and adolescents aged 0-19 years experienced sleep disturbances, had inadequate sleep habits, and had sleep durations lower than the recommended duration 3. While sleep disturbances in adolescents may seem normative, sleep problems are known to be associated with a wide spectrum of physical and mental health problems, such as obesity, growth hormone deficiency, substance abuse, depression, suicidality, anxiety, difficulties with impulse control, and the compulsive use of social media and video games 4-12. Moreover, strong associations between sleep problems and various cognitive functions, including memory, learning, and attention, have been reported by an established body of previous research 13-15 .

Predicting sleep quality from brain white matter volume: A voxel-based morphometry study

“…These ndings also supported the neurobiological model of insomnia (Buysse et al, 2011) that assumed that the speci c brain regions related to sleep include the cortico-limbic circuits, the default mode network, the hypothalamic centers, and the brainstem-hypothalamic arousal centers. Furthermore, in line with our ndings, research suggests that the right PostCG was a main receptive region for external stimuli, which was located in the somatosensory network (SSN) (Joo et al, 2013;Sung et al, 2020). A structural MRI study demonstrated a signi cant reduction in the bilateral PostCG in patients with primary insomnia (Joo et al, 2013), which was related to sleep latency.…”

“…Finally, the previous studies revealed that associations with sleep disturbances had decreased volumes in the left IPL (Sung et al, 2020). In contrast, our ndings revealed that the WMV in left IPL was negatively associated with subjective sleep quality and sleep duration.…”

Associations between brain structure and sleep patterns across adolescent development

“…Developmentallyspecific brain-sleep relationships could inform the optimal timing of brain and/or sleep-based interventions that promote healthier neurodevelopmental outcomes. Several initial reports have identified ties between diverse gray matter structures and sleep in pediatric populations [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] .…”

The Association Between Hippocampal Volume and Level of Attention in Children and Adolescents

“…All the participants who were engaged in this study met the following criteria: (i) they were capable of understanding and following the instructions and descriptions fully in the present study; (ii) they had no possibility of pregnancy for female before the study; (iii) they were taking no medications that could significantly influence their waking and sleep conditions; and (iv) they had no predicted problems in neuroimaging and psychological tests. Participants with any clear neuropsychiatric history of psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or pediatric psychosis), developmental disorders (autism or intellectual disabilities), learning disabilities, language impairments, uncorrected sensory impairments, neurological disorders (convulsive disorder), or acquired brain injury (cerebral palsy) were excluded from the analyses (Sung et al, 2020).…”

“…The methods have been described in detail in previous studies. (Jung et al, 2019;Sung et al, 2020): (1) the images were manually reoriented to the anterior commissure, (2) the gray matter was segmented using a standard tissue probability map provided by SPM, (3) using the DARTEL procedure, all the images were created as a study-specific template, (4) the images were spatially normalized using the DARTEL template, and the brain size of individuals was adjusted during spatial normalization, and (5) the gray matter was smoothed with a Gaussian kernel of 8 mm full-width at half maximum. After preprocessing, the regional GMV (rGMV) was extracted by averaging the values in the left and right hippocampi, which were defined using the automated anatomical labeling (AAL) atlas.…”