That All-Nighter is not without Neuroconsequences
As you put the finishing touches on your paper, you notice the sun rising and fantasize about crawling in bed. Your vision and hearing are beginning to distort and the words staring back at you from the monitor have lost their meaning. Your brain … well, feels like mush. We’ve all been there. That debilitating brain fog that inevitably sets in after an all-nighter prompts the obvious question: what does sleep deprivation actually do to the brain?...MORE
Neuroscientists from Norway set out to answer this question in their recent PLOS ONE study, examining how a night forgoing sleep affects brain microstructure. Among their findings, sleep deprivation induced widespread structural alterations throughout the brain. The lead author shares his thoughts on the possible biological causes of these changes, and whether they may be long-lasting.Inducing sleep deprivation
The researchers assessed a group of 21 healthy young men over the course of a day. The participants underwent diffusion tensor imaging (DTI; a form of MRI that measures water diffusion and can be used to evaluate white matter integrity) when they first awoke, at 7:30 am. They were free to go about their day as normal before returning for a second DTI scan at 9:30 pm. They remained in the lab for monitoring until a final scan at 6:30 am the following morning, for a total period of 23 hours of continued waking. Since we’re now learning that anything and everything can influence brain structure on surprisingly short time-scales, the researchers finely controlled as many confounding factors as possible. The participants were not allowed to exercise or consume alcohol, caffeine or nicotine during the study, or to eat right before the scans. Since DTI measures water diffusion, hydration was evaluated at all sessions and accounted for in their analysis.
Rapid microstructural changes to waking
The researchers were interested in two main questions: How does the brain change after a normal day of wakefulness and after sleep deprivation? They focused on three DTI metrics to probe how different features of neuronal tissue may change with waking. Radial diffusivity (RD) measures how water diffuses across fibers, whereas axial diffusivity (AD) measures diffusion along the length of a tract. Fractional anisotropy (FA) is the ratio of axial to radial diffusivity and therefore measures how strongly water diffuses along a single direction.
From morning to evening, FA increased and this was driven mostly by reduced RD (Figure, left). From the evening to the next morning – after the all-nighter – FA values decreased to levels comparable to the prior morning, and this drop was coupled with a decrease in AD (Figure, right). Thus, over the course of a full day of wakefulness FA fluctuated, temporarily rising but eventually rebounding. In contrast, both RD and AD declined but at different rates, RD dropping by the end of a normal day, and AD dropping later, only after considerable sleep deprivation. These changes were non-specific, occurring throughout the brain, including in the corpus callosum, brainstem, thalamus and frontotemporal and parieto-occipital tracts.
How bad are the neuroconsequences of sleep deprivation?Throughout the brain, FA values increase from morning to evening (left) and decrease from the evening to the next morning after a night without sleep (right). Elvsåshagen et al., 2015.
Other studies have corroborated these reports that wakefulness alters the brain, including reduced diffusion with increasing time awake, and altered functional connectivity after sleep deprivation. How this plasticity reflects the consequences of waking on the brain, however, isn’t clear. Sleep is known to be essential to tissue repair and is particularly important for promoting lipid integrity to maintain healthy cell membranes and myelination. The question remains, therefore, how detrimental the structural reorganization from sleep deprivation really is. Does the plasticity reported here and elsewhere persist for days, weeks or longer, or can a long night of deep catch-up sleep reverse any detriment that all-nighter caused?
“My hypothesis,” says first author Dr. Torbjørn Elvsåshagen, “would be that the putative effects of one night of sleep deprivation on white matter microstructure are short term and reverse after one to a few nights of normal sleep. However, it could be hypothesized that chronic sleep insufficiency might lead to longer-lasting alterations in brain structure. Consistent with this idea, evidence for an association between impaired sleep and localized cortical thinning was found in obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, mild cognitive impairment and community-dwelling adults. Whether chronic sleep insufficiency can lead to longer-lasting alterations in white matter structure remains to be clarified.”
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