Respiratory-cycle related analysis of the EEG-spectrum during sleep: a healthy population study

Recent research has shown the EEG's spectral changes that occur in synchrony with the respiratory-cycle. During wakefulness, and for healthy subjects it is reported that the EEG power in several frequency bands changes between the expiratory and inspiratory phases. For sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) patients, it is reported that the amplitude of changes in normalized EEG power (referred to as respiratory-cycle related EEG changes RCREC) within a respiratory-cycle decreases after a successful intervention to alleviate the SDB condition. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the changes in the sleep’s EEG spectrum related to the respiratory-cycle for a healthy population comprising 39 subjects. For 3 sleep stages (N2, N3, REM), 6 EEG channels, and 7 frequency bands, two types of EEG spectral analyzes were considered: 1) the ratio between the EEG power during expiration and that during inspiration, and 2) the RCREC. For the first type of analysis and at the population level, no statistically significant difference was found between the EEG power during expiration and that during inspiration. For the second type of analysis, the RCREC for all conditions is at a level that is statistically significantly larger than 0.1. The latter being the value at which the RCREC decreased after successful SDB intervention.