The brain functional connectome is robustly altered by lack of sleep

Abstract

Sleep is a universal phenomenon necessary for maintaining homeostasis and function across a range of organs. Lack of sleep has severe health-related consequences affecting whole-body functioning, yet no other organ is as severely affected as the brain. The neurophysiological mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. Here, we characterize the dynamic changes in brain connectivity profiles inflicted by sleep deprivation and how they deviate from regular daily variability. To this end, we obtained functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 60 young, adult male participants, scanned in the morning and evening of the same day and again the following morning. 41 participants underwent total sleep deprivation before the third scan, whereas the remainder had another night of regular sleep. Sleep deprivation strongly altered the connectivity of several resting-state networks, including dorsal attention, default mode, and hippocampal networks. Multivariate classification based on connectivity profiles predicted deprivation state with high accuracy, corroborating the robustness of the findings on an individual level. Finally, correlation analysis suggested that morning-to-evening connectivity changes were reverted by sleep (control group)-a pattern which did not occur after deprivation. We conclude that both, a day of waking and a night of sleep deprivation dynamically alter the brain functional connectome.

Objective and subjective measures of prior sleep–wake behavior predict functional connectivity in the default mode network during NREM sleep

“…This suggests that the association between BTST and FC was not impacted by the transitions between wake and sleep, or between sleep stages. Interestingly, both time of day and sleep deprivation have been shown to impact waking FC within the DMN, with increased FC strength in wake following sleep deprivation (Kaufmann et al, 2015). We show that this decrease in DMN FC with increased sleep pressure is different when sleep itself is included, with less sleep the night before scanning associated with higher FC.…”

Brain connectivity aberrations in anabolic-androgenic steroid users

“…The remaining 30 components constituted the nodes in subsequent network analyses, and the corresponding 435 temporal partial correlations between each component pairs formed the edges (connections) of the full network. As in previous studies (Kaufmann et al, 2016, Kaufmann et al, 2015, Skatun et al, n.d), for each subject, we computed the regularized partial correlations (Smith et al, 2011) with automated individual estimation of regularization strength (Ledoit and Wolf, 2003). …”

The sleep-deprived human brain

“…Across these networks, SD is associated with reduced connectivity within the default mode network (DMN), the dorsal attention network, and the auditory, visual and motor networks 143–145 . In fact, measures of abnormal change in whole-brain connectivity enable classification of an individual as either being rested or sleep deprived with more than 60% accuracy 144 .…”