Regional Differences of the Human Sleep Electroencephalogram in Response to Selective Slow-wave Sleep Deprivation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the topographic changes in sleep recuperative processes in response to selective slow-wave sleep (SWS) deprivation. SWS was suppressed on two consecutive nights by means of acoustic stimulation. The electroencephalogram (EEG) power of baseline, deprivation and recovery nights was analysed in 1 Hz bins. During the SWS deprivation nights, large decreases of EEG power were found at frontopolar, central and parietal derivations encompassing the delta, theta and alpha range, while only slow delta (0.5-2 Hz) was affected at the frontal derivation. Recovery sleep was characterized by a generalized increase of power during non-REM sleep encompassing the delta, theta and alpha bands, with a clear antero-posterior gradient. The coherent behaviour of different EEG bands with traditionally different electrophysiological meanings during non-REM sleep suggests that, in light of the recent advances in sleep neurophysiology, a re-examination of the functional role of EEG rhythms during sleep is needed. The 'resistance' to selective SWS deprivation of the frontal area, together with its larger increase of EEG power during recovery, may be interpreted as a sign of a greater sleep need of the frontal cortical areas, confirming that some aspects of the regulatory processes of human sleep are local in nature and may show use-dependent characteristics.

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A Unique Pattern of Sleep Structure is Found to be Identical at all Cortical Sites: a Neurobiological Interpretation

“…In addition to our main results, our data show that the average power level of the SPTCs differ between topographical sites, being highest in the frontal and lowest in the posterior regions. A lthough not a primar y concern here, this is in line with a number of studies that have focused on the issue of regional differences in average spectral power (Jobert et al, 1992;Kattler et al, 1994;Werth et al, 1996;Cajochen et al, 1999;Vyazovskiy et al, 2000;Achermann et al, 2001;Anderer et al, 2001;Finelli et al, 2001;Ferrara et al, 2002b;Knoblauch et al, 2002). The question that arises is: what is (are) the brain structure(s) that could give rise to these two distinct types of obser vation, one on similarity of shape and timing of power time-courses and the other on differences in the average power of the time-courses?…”

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“…But this parallelism is only partially true, since postdeprivation homeostatic changes in quantitative EEG mostly affect frontal and central areas (Finelli et al 2001;Ferrara et al 2002), whereas we do not show any change in the lowfrequency EEG activity on the frontal derivation. Furthermore, after sleep deprivation, sigma power in NREM sleep decreases compared to the BSL (e.g., Finelli et al 2001;Ferrara et al 2002), whereas in the present study it did not show significant changes.…”