Circadian dynamics in measures of cortical excitation and inhibition balance

Several neuropsychiatric and neurological disorders have recently been characterized as dysfunctions arising from a ‘final common pathway’ of imbalanced excitation to inhibition within cortical networks. How the regulation of a cortical E/I ratio is affected by sleep and the circadian rhythm however, remains to be established. Here we addressed this issue through the analyses of TMS-evoked responses recorded over a 29h sleep deprivation protocol conducted in young and healthy volunteers. Spectral analyses of TMS-evoked responses in frontal cortex revealed non-linear changes in gamma band evoked oscillations, compatible with an influence of circadian timing on inhibitory interneuron activity. In silico inferences of cell-to-cell excitatory and inhibitory connectivity and GABA/Glutamate receptor time constant based on neural mass modeling within the Dynamic causal modeling framework, further suggested excitation/inhibition balance was under a strong circadian influence. These results indicate that circadian changes in EEG spectral properties, in measure of excitatory/inhibitory connectivity and in GABA/glutamate receptor function could support the maintenance of cognitive performance during a normal waking day, but also during overnight wakefulness. More generally, these findings demonstrate a slow daily regulation of cortical excitation/inhibition balance, which depends on circadian-timing and prior sleep-wake history

Neuroimaging, cognition, light and circadian rhythms.

In humans, sleep and wakefulness and the associated cognitive processes are regulated through interactions between sleep homeostasis and the circadian system. Chronic disruption of sleep and circadian rhythmicity is common in our society and there is a need for a better understanding of the brain mechanisms regulating sleep, wakefulness and associated cognitive processes. This review summarizes recent investigations which provide first neural correlates of the combined influence of sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythmicity on cognitive brain activity. Markers of interindividual variations in sleep-wake regulation, such as chronotype and polymorphisms in sleep and clock genes, are associated with changes in cognitive brain responses in subcortical and cortical areas in response to manipulations of the sleep-wake cycle. This review also includes recent data showing that cognitive brain activity is regulated by light, which is a powerful modulator of cognition and alertness and also directly impacts sleep and circadian rhythmicity. The effect of light varied with age, psychiatric status, PERIOD3 genotype and changes in sleep homeostasis and circadian phase. These data provide new insights into the contribution of demographic characteristics, the sleep-wake cycle, circadian rhythmicity and light to brain functioning

Automatic artifacts and arousals detection in whole-night sleep EEG recordings

In sleep electroencephalographic (EEG) signals, artifacts and arousals marking are usually part of the processing. This visual inspection by a human expert has two main drawbacks: it is very time consuming and subjective. To detect artifacts and arousals in a reliable, systematic and reproducible automatic way, we developed an automatic detection based on time and frequency analysis with adapted thresholds derived from data themselves. The automatic detection performance is assessed using 5 statistic parameters, on 60 whole night sleep recordings coming from 35 healthy volunteers (male and female) aged between 19 and 26. The proposed approach proves its robustness against inter- and intra-, subjects and raters’ scorings, variability. The agreement with human raters is rated overall from substantial to excellent and provides a significantly more reliable method than between human raters. Existing methods detect only specific artifacts or only arousals, and/or these methods are validated on short episodes of sleep recordings, making it difficult to compare with our whole night results. The method works on a whole night recording and is fully automatic, reproducible, and reliable. Furthermore the implementation of the method will be made available online as open source code

Circadian regulation of human cortical excitability

Prolonged wakefulness alters cortical excitability, which is essential for proper brain function and cognition. However, besides prior wakefulness, brain function and cognition are also affected by circadian rhythmicity. Whether the regulation of cognition involves a circadian impact on cortical excitability is unknown. Here, we assessed cortical excitability from scalp EEG-responses to transcranial magnetic stimulation in 22 participants during 29-h of wakefulness under constant conditions. Data reveal robust circadian dynamics of cortical excitability that were strongest in those individuals with highest endocrine markers of circadian amplitude. In addition, the time course of cortical excitability correlated with changes in EEG synchronization and cognitive performance. These results demonstrate that the crucial factor for cortical excitability, and basic brain function in general, is the balance between circadian rhythmicity and sleep need, rather than sleep homeostasis alone. These findings have implications for clinical applications such as noninvasive brain stimulation in neurorehabilitation