Data-Driven Analysis of EEG Reveals Concomitant Superficial Sleep During Deep Sleep in Insomnia Disorder.

Julie Anja Engelhard Christensen,Yishul Wei,Poul Jørgen Jennum,Jennifer R Ramautar,Eus J W Van Someren,Rick Wassing,Oti Lakbila-Kamal

doi:10.3389/fnins.2019.00598

Abstract

Study Objectives: The subjective suffering of people with Insomnia Disorder (ID) is insufficiently accounted for by traditional sleep classification, which presumes a strict sequential occurrence of global brain states. Recent studies challenged this presumption by showing concurrent sleep- and wake-type neuronal activity. We hypothesized enhanced co-occurrence of diverging EEG vigilance signatures during sleep in ID.Methods: Electroencephalography (EEG) in 55 cases with ID and 64 controls without sleep complaints was subjected to a Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model describing each 30 s epoch as a mixture of six vigilance states called Topics (T), ranked from N3-related T1 and T2 to wakefulness-related T6. For each stable epoch we determined topic dominance (the probability of the most likely topic), topic co-occurrence (the probability of the remaining topics), and epoch-to-epoch transition probabilities.Results: In stable epochs where the N1-related T4 was dominant, T4 was more dominant in ID than in controls, and patients showed an almost doubled co-occurrence of T4 during epochs where the N3-related T1 was dominant. Furthermore, patients had a higher probability of switching from T1- to T4-dominated epochs, at the cost of switching to N3-related T2-dominated epochs, and a higher probability of switching from N2-related T3- to wakefulness-related T6-dominated epochs.Conclusion: Even during their deepest sleep, the EEG of people with ID express more N1-related vigilance signatures than good sleepers do. People with ID are moreover more likely to switch from deep to light sleep and from N2 sleep to wakefulness. The findings suggest that hyperarousal never rests in ID.

Highlights

Insomnia disorder (ID) is characterized by persistent difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep associated with daytime dysfunction which cannot be attributed to insufficient opportunity for sleep (American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2014)
These findings indicate that stable epochs of light sleep in Estimated mean topic dominances defined as the mean probability of each topic when that topic is stable and 95%-confidence intervals for controls and subjects with Insomnia disorder (ID)
No other transitions were found to differ between groups. These findings indicate that compared to ID, controls have a higher tendency to switch from stable epochs dominated by one deep sleep related topic to epochs dominated by another deep sleep related topic, effectively remaining in deep sleep, whereas participants with ID have a higher tendency to switch to an epoch dominated by a light sleep related topic or from a stable epoch dominated by a N2-related topic to wakefulness

Summary

Introduction

Insomnia disorder (ID) is characterized by persistent difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep associated with daytime dysfunction which cannot be attributed to insufficient opportunity for sleep (American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2014). ID has been identified as the second most common mental disorder in Europe (Wittchen et al, 2011). Polysomnography (PSG) findings in subjects with ID include reductions in sleep continuity and in the time spent in slow-wave sleep and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep (Baglioni et al, 2014). These reductions, hardly correlate with the subjective severity of sleep complaints (Manconi et al, 2010) in ID and typically underestimate it.

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Conclusion