Sleep problems are increasingly present in the general population at any age, and they are frequently concurrent with-or predictive of-memory disturbances, anxiety, and depression. In this exploratory cross-sectional study, 54 healthy participants recruited in Naples (Italy; 23 females; mean age = 37.1 years, range = 20-68) completed the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and a neurocognitive assessment concerning both verbal and visuospatial working memory as well as subjective measures of anxiety and depression. Then, 3T fMRI images with structural and resting-state functional sequences were acquired. A whole-brain seed-to-seed functional connectivity (FC) analysis was conducted by contrasting good (PSQI score <5) vs. bad (PSQI score ≥5) sleepers. Results highlighted FC differences in limbic and fronto-temporo-parietal brain areas. Also, bad sleepers showed an anxious/depressive behavioural phenotype and performed worse than good sleepers at visuospatial working-memory tasks. These findings may help to reveal the effects of sleep quality on daily-life cognitive functioning and further elucidate pathophysiological mechanisms of sleep disorders.
Keywords: anxiety; depression; functional connectivity; subjective sleep quality; working memory.
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