Sleep disturbances are associated with cortical and subcortical atrophy in alcohol use disorder

Abstract

Sleep disturbances are prominent in patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) and predict relapse. So far, the mechanisms underlying sleep disruptions in AUD are poorly understood. Because sleep-related regions vastly overlap with regions, where patients with AUD showed pronounced grey matter (GM) reduction; we hypothesized that GM structure could contribute to sleep disturbances associated with chronic alcohol use. We combined sleep EEG recording and high-resolution structural brain imaging to examine the GM-sleep associations in 36 AUD vs. 26 healthy controls (HC). The patterns of GM-sleep associations differed for N3 vs. REM sleep and for AUD vs. HC. For cortical thickness (CT), CT-sleep associations were significant in AUD but not in HC and were lateralized such that lower CT in right hemisphere was associated with shorter N3, whereas in left hemisphere was associated with shorter REM sleep. For the GM density (GMD), we observed a more extensive positive GMD-N3 association in AUD (right orbitofrontal cortex, cerebellum, dorsal cingulate and occipital cortex) than in HC (right orbitofrontal cortex), and the GMD-REM association was positive in AUD (midline, motor and paralimbic regions) whereas negative in HC (the left supramarginal gyrus). GM structure mediated the effect of chronic alcohol use on the duration of N3 and the age by alcohol effect on REM sleep. Our findings provide evidence that sleep disturbances in AUD were associated with GM reductions. Targeting sleep-related regions might improve sleep in AUD and enhance sleep-induced benefits in cognition and emotional regulation for recovery.

Deficient sleep, altered hypothalamic functional connectivity, depression and anxiety in cigarette smokers

“…Although we highlighted the findings of mediation analyses for depression and anxiety, across the ASR measures that showed a significant correlation with both total PSQI scores and hypothalamus-rPoCG rsFC, the models of hypothalamus-somatosensory cortical connectivity → sleep disturbance → clinical comorbidities showed significant and complete mediation in most cases ( Supplementary Table S4 ). Note that the findings of mediation analyses do not suggest causality but rather highlight an important role of deficient sleep in inter-relating brain functional changes and emotional symptoms in adults who smoke, as has also been demonstrated for alcohol use disorders ( Zhang et al, 2021b ). These findings suggest that treatments to improve deficient sleep may benefit individuals with nicotine and potentially other substance use disorders.…”

APOE ε4, Alzheimer’s disease neuropathology and sleep disturbance, in individuals with and without dementia

“…Previous work linked possession of ε4 with accelerated age-related cortical thickness loss [ 78 , 79 ]. This itself was associated with self-reported sleep disturbance in healthy community dwelling adults [ 80 ] and reduced objectively measured total sleep time, random eye movement, N2 and N3 stages of sleep in alcohol-use disorder [ 81 ].…”

Alteration of Cortical Volume and Thickness in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

“…Previous research on alcohol use disorder patients with sleep disorder showed reduced overall cortical volume (Wiers et al, 2015;Tomasi et al, 2019). Zhang et al (2021) showed that longer sleep-wave and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep was significantly associated with greater cortical thickness. Diffusion tensor imaging showed abnormal inferior frontal gyrus correlations between "SDS" and DTI parameters in ME/CFS patients (Thapaliya et al, 2021).…”