Arousal Threshold Reveals Novel Neural Markers of Sleep Depth Independently from the Conventional Sleep Stages

Overview

Journal bioRxiv

Date 2024 Aug 16

PMID 39149368

Authors

Dante Picchioni

Fan Nils Yang

Jacco A de Zwart

Yicun Wang

Hendrik Mandelkow

Pinar S Ozbay

Gang Chen

Paul A Taylor

Niki Lam

Miranda G Chappel-Farley

Catie Chang

Jiaen Liu

Peter van Gelderen

Jeff H Duyn

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Reports of sleep-specific brain activity patterns have been constrained by assessing brain function as it related to the conventional polysomnographic sleep stages. This limits the variety of sleep states and underlying activity patterns that one can discover. The current study used all-night functional MRI sleep data and defined sleep behaviorally with auditory arousal threshold (AAT) to characterize sleep depth better by searching for novel neural markers of sleep depth that are neuroanatomically localized and temporally unrelated to the conventional stages. Functional correlation values calculated in a four-min time window immediately before the determination of AAT were entered into a linear mixed effects model, allowing multiple arousals across the night per subject into the analysis, and compared to models with sleep stage to determine the unique relationships with AAT. These unique relationships were for thalamocerebellar correlations, the relationship between the right language network and the right "default-mode network dorsal medial prefrontal cortex subsystem," and the relationship between thalamus and ventral attention network. These novel neural markers of sleep depth would have remained undiscovered if the data were merely analyzed with the conventional sleep stages.

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