Opposing brain signatures of sleep in task-based and resting-state conditions

• Published in: Nature communications Vol. 14; no. 1; p. 7927
• Main Authors: Abdelhack, Mohamed, Zhukovsky, Peter, Milic, Milos, Harita, Shreyas, Wainberg, Michael, Tripathy, Shreejoy J., Griffiths, John D., Hill, Sean L., Felsky, Daniel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.12.2023; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 59/36; 631/378/1385/1815; 631/378/1689/1414; 631/378/2649/1723; Accelerometers; Brain; Cognition; Cognitive ability; Correlation; Humanities and Social Sciences; Insomnia; Medical imaging; multidisciplinary; Neuroimaging; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Signatures; Sleep; Sleep and wakefulness; Sleep disorders; Wakefulness
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43737-7

Sleep and depression have a complex, bidirectional relationship, with sleep-associated alterations in brain dynamics and structure impacting a range of symptoms and cognitive abilities. Previous work describing these relationships has provided an incomplete picture by investigating only one or two types of sleep measures, depression, or neuroimaging modalities in parallel. We analyze the correlations between brainwide neural signatures of sleep, cognition, and depression in task and resting-state data from over 30,000 individuals from the UK Biobank and Human Connectome Project. Neural signatures of insomnia and depression are negatively correlated with those of sleep duration measured by accelerometer in the task condition but positively correlated in the resting-state condition. Our results show that resting-state neural signatures of insomnia and depression resemble that of rested wakefulness. This is further supported by our finding of hypoconnectivity in task but hyperconnectivity in resting-state data in association with insomnia and depression. These observations dispute conventional assumptions about the neurofunctional manifestations of hyper- and hypo-somnia, and may explain inconsistent findings in the literature. The associations between sleep, depression and brain activity are not well understood. Here, the authors show patterns of brain activity associated with insomnia and depression resemble those found in people who sleep less, but only under cognitive load. At rest, these activation patterns are hyperconnected and resemble those found in longer sleepers.