Objective: Sleep dysfunction in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a commonly reported symptom.  Analysis of brain wave synchronicity may help to unravel this phenomenon and serve to support a diagnosis of PD.

Background: Time Delay Stability (TDS) method assesses via EEG the degree of coupling between different frequency bands across brain locations.  Segments of EEG power are analyzed at defined time windows. Coordinated bursts lead to pronounced cross-correlation within each time window. A time lag can occur between the two signals in physiological coupling, this is defined as TDS. The fraction of time when TDS is observed in the EEG, quantifies the degree of coupling strength. Longer periods of TDS reflect stronger coupling. TDS in sleep is not reported in PD patients.

Method: We analyzed and compared polysomnographic recordings from 40 PD patients (11 female, 29 male, ages 50-95 years) and 97 healthy age matched controls (51 female, 46 male).

Results: Robust sleep-stage patterns are observed for healthy subjects and PD (with one-way ANOVA p ≤ 0.001).  PD show stronger brain-chin/leg interactions especially for Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep and Deep Sleep (DS) (with MW tests p ≤ 0.002). An increase in the interaction strength overall in the sleep-stage stratification pattern is observed in PD.

Conclusion: This is the first report of TDS in PD. In this pilot study PD subjects show generally stronger brain-chin/leg interactions compared to healthy subjects representing and increase in signal synchrony in this patient population. Follow up studies are required to further validate specificity to the disease and disease severity markers.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/increased-brain-chin-leg-eeg-synchronicity-in-sleep-in-parkinsons-disease/