The Menstrual Cycle Modulates Whole-Brain Turbulent Dynamics

Eleonora De Filippi; Carme Uribe; Daniela S Avila-Varela; Noelia Martínez-Molina; Venera Gashaj; Laura Pritschet; Tyler Santander; Emily G Jacobs; Morten L Kringelbach; Yonatan Sanz Perl; Gustavo Deco; Anira Escrichs

doi:10.3389/fnins.2021.753820

The Menstrual Cycle Modulates Whole-Brain Turbulent Dynamics

Front Neurosci. 2021 Dec 9:15:753820. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2021.753820. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Eleonora De Filippi¹, Carme Uribe^{2

3}, Daniela S Avila-Varela⁴, Noelia Martínez-Molina¹, Venera Gashaj^{1

5}, Laura Pritschet⁶, Tyler Santander⁶, Emily G Jacobs⁷, Morten L Kringelbach^{8

9

10}, Yonatan Sanz Perl¹, Gustavo Deco^{1

11

12

13}, Anira Escrichs¹

Affiliations

¹ Computational Neuroscience Group, Center for Brain and Cognition, Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
² Research Imaging Centre, Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
³ Medical Psychology Unit, Department of Medicine, Institute of Neuroscience, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
⁴ Speech Acquisition and Perception Group, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
⁵ Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland.
⁶ Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States.
⁷ Neuroscience Research Institute, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, United States.
⁸ Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
⁹ Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
¹⁰ Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
¹¹ Institució Catalana de la Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain.
¹² Department of Neuropsychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
¹³ Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.

Abstract

Brain dynamics have recently been shown to be modulated by rhythmic changes in female sex hormone concentrations across an entire menstrual cycle. However, many questions remain regarding the specific differences in information processing across spacetime between the two main follicular and luteal phases in the menstrual cycle. Using a novel turbulent dynamic framework, we studied whole-brain information processing across spacetime scales (i.e., across long and short distances in the brain) in two open-source, dense-sampled resting-state datasets. A healthy naturally cycling woman in her early twenties was scanned over 30 consecutive days during a naturally occurring menstrual cycle and under a hormonal contraceptive regime. Our results indicated that the luteal phase is characterized by significantly higher information transmission across spatial scales than the follicular phase. Furthermore, we found significant differences in turbulence levels between the two phases in brain regions belonging to the default mode, salience/ventral attention, somatomotor, control, and dorsal attention networks. Finally, we found that changes in estradiol and progesterone concentrations modulate whole-brain turbulent dynamics in long distances. In contrast, we reported no significant differences in information processing measures between the active and placebo phases in the hormonal contraceptive study. Overall, the results demonstrate that the turbulence framework is able to capture differences in whole-brain turbulent dynamics related to ovarian hormones and menstrual cycle stages.

Keywords: brain information processing; menstrual cycle; resting-state fMRI; turbulence; whole-brain dynamics.