Enhanced brain small-worldness after sleep deprivation: a compensatory effect

Sleep deprivation has a variable impact on extrinsic activities during multiple cognitive tasks, especially on mood and emotion processing. There is also a trait-like individual vulnerability or compensatory effect in cognition. Previous studies have elucidated the altered functional connectivity after sleep deprivation. However, it remains unclear whether the small-world properties of resting-state network are sensitive to sleep deprivation. A small-world network is a type of graph that combines a high local connectivity as well as a few long-range connections, which ensures a higher information-processing efficiency at a low cost. The complex network of the brain can be described as a small-world network, in which a node is a brain region and an edge is present when there is a functional correlation between two nodes. Here, we investigated the topological properties of the human brain networks of 22 healthy subjects under sufficient sleep and sleep-deprived conditions. Specifically, small-worldness is utilized to quantify the small-world property, by comparing the clustering coefficient and path length of a given network to an equivalent random network with same degree distribution. After sufficient sleep, the brain networks showed the property of small-worldness. Compared with the resting state under sufficient sleep, the small-world property was significantly enhanced in the sleep deprivation condition, suggesting a possible compensatory adaptation of the human brain. Specifically, the altered measurements were correlated with the neuroticism of subjects, indicating that individuals with low-levels of neuroticism are more resilient to sleep deprivation.