Masoud Tahmasian

Forschungszentrum Jülich · Institute of Neurosciences and Medicine (INM)

Insomnia affects a substantial proportion of the population and frequently co-occurs with mental illnesses including depression and anxiety. However, the neurobiological correlates of these disorders remain unclear. Here we review magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies assessing structural and functional brain associations with depressive and anx...

Background Neuroimaging studies have provided valuable insights into the macroscale impacts of antidepressants on brain functions in patients with major depressive disorder. However, the findings of individual studies are inconsistent. Here, we aimed to provide a quantitative synthesis of the literature to identify convergence of the reported findi...

Objectives: Normal sleep is crucial for brain health. Recent studies have reported robust associations between sleep disturbance and various brain structural and functional traits. However, the complex interplay between sleep health and macro-scale brain organization remains inconclusive. In this study, we aimed to uncover the links between brain i...

Background Depressive symptoms are rising in the general population, but their associated factors are unclear. Although the link between sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms severity (DSS) is reported, the predictive role of sleep on DSS and the impact of anxiety and the brain on their relationship remained obscure. Methods Using three popul...

Study Objectives Insomnia symptoms are prevalent along the trajectory of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but the neurobiological underpinning of their interaction is poorly understood. Here, we assessed structural and functional brain measures within and between the default mode network (DMN), salience network (SN), and central executive network (CEN)....

There is a recognized link between risk factors for non-communicable diseases and brain health. However, the specific effects that they have on brain health are still poorly understood, preventing its implementation in clinical practice. For instance, the association between such risk factors and cortical thickness (CT) has been primarily explored...

Motor performance (MP) is essential for functional independence and well-being, particularly in later life. However, the relationship between behavioural aspects such as sleep quality and depressive symptoms, which contribute to MP, and the underlying structural brain substrates of their interplay remains unclear. This study used three population-b...

Background: Insomnia is prevalent along the trajectory of Alzheimer disease (AD), but the neurobiological underpinning of their interaction is poorly understood. Here, we assessed structural and functional brain measures within and between the default mode network (DMN), salience network (SN), and central executive network (CEN). Methods: We select...

Background Emerging evidence increasingly suggests that poor sleep quality is associated with depressive symptoms. The hippocampus might play a crucial role in the interplay between sleep disturbance and depressive symptomatology, e.g., hippocampal atrophy is typically seen in both insomnia disorder and depression. Thus, examining the role of hippo...

Background Neuroimaging studies have provided valuable insights into the macroscale impacts of antidepressants on brain functions in patients with major depressive disorder. However, the findings of individual studies are inconsistent. Here, we aimed to provide a quantitative synthesis of the literature to identify convergence of the reported findi...

It is unclear to what extent the absence of vision affects the sensory sensitivity for oneiric construction. Similarly, the presence of visual imagery in the mentation of dreams of congenitally blind people has been largely disputed. We investigate the presence and nature of oneiric visuo-spatial impressions by analysing 180 dreams of seven congeni...

Sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) is prevalent in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We assessed whether and how SDB affects neuroimaging biomarkers of AD, including amyloid-beta plaque burden (Aβ), regional uptake of fluorodeoxyglucose using positron emission tomography (rFDG-PET), grey matter volume (GMV), as well as cognitive scores and cerebrospinal flui...

Background Depressive symptoms are rising in the general population and can lead to depression years later, but the contributing factors are less known. Although the link between sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms has been reported, the predictive role of sleep on depressive symptoms severity (DSS) and the impact of anxiety and brain struct...

Emerging evidence increasingly suggests that poor sleep quality is associated with depressive symptoms. The hippocampus plays a crucial role in the interplay between sleep disturbance and depressive symptomatology e.g., accelerated hippocampal atrophy is typically seen in both insomnia disorder and depression. Hence, it is critical to examine the p...

As suggested by previous research, sleep health is assumed to be a key determinant of future morbidity and mortality. In line with this, recent studies have found that poor sleep is associated with impaired cognitive function. However, to date, little is known about brain structural abnormalities underlying this association. Although recent finding...

Theoretical models of insomnia disorder recognise an emotional component in the maintenance of the disorder. Nonetheless, the field of emotions is vast and different processes are involved in psychological well-being. The present narrative review focusses on emotion regulation and affect dynamics, synthesising some of the most recent and relevant e...

The neurobiological underpinnings of insomnia disorder (ID) are still poorly understood. A previous meta-analysis conducted by our research group in 2018 revealed no consistent regional alterations based on the limited number of eligible studies. Given the number of studies published during the last few years, we revisited the meta-analysis to prov...

Insomnia and emotion dysregulation (ED) are intricately related, yet their aggregate association across different domains of ED and the effect of moderating factors such as health status, age, and gender on their relationship remain unclear. This meta-analysis synthesized data from 57 studies, pooling 119 effect sizes from correlational and 55 from...

Bidirectional relationship between sleep disturbances and affective disorders is increasingly recognised, but its underlying mechanisms are far from clear, and there is a scarcity of studies that report on sleep disturbances in recurrent depressive disorder (RDD) and bipolar affective disorder (BPAD). To address this, we conducted a retrospective s...

Insomnia disorder (ID) is a prevalent mental illness. Several behavioral and neuroimaging studies suggested that ID is a heterogenous condition with various subtypes. However, neurobiological alterations in different subtypes of ID are poorly understood. We aimed to assess whether unimodal and multimodal whole-brain neuroimaging measurements can di...

Existing neuroimaging studies have reported divergent structural alterations in insomnia disorder (ID). In the present study, we performed a large-scale coordinated meta-analysis by pooling structural brain measures from 1085 subjects (mean [SD] age 50.5 [13.9] years, 50.2% female, 17.4% with insomnia) across three international Enhancing NeuroImag...

Introduction: Coordinate-based meta-analysis (CBMA) is a standard method for integrating brain functional patterns in neuroimaging studies. CBMA aims to identify convergency in activated brain regions across studies using coordinates of the peak activation (foci). Here, we aimed to introduce a new application of the Gibbs models for the meta-regres...

Time is an omnipresent aspect of almost everything we experience internally or in the external world. The experience of time occurs through such an extensive set of contextual factors that, after decades of research, a unified understanding of its neural substrates is still elusive. In this study, following the recent best-practice guidelines, we c...

Existing neuroimaging studies have reported divergent structural alterations in insomnia. Here, we performed a large-scale coordinated meta-analysis by pooling structural brain measures from 1,085 subjects with and without insomnia symptoms across three international ENIGMA-Sleep cohorts. The influence of insomnia on MRI-based brain morphometry usi...

Insomnia disorder (ID) is a prevalent mental illness, which is associated with poor quality of life, an increased rate of motor vehicle accidents, depressive symptoms, emotion dysregulation, and memory impairment. Several behavioural and neuroimaging studies suggested that various subtypes of ID are existing. However, the neurobiological underpinni...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common mental disorder, which is strongly associated with insomnia, yet their epidemiological overlap is poorly understood. To determine the convergent quantitative magnitude of their relationship, PubMed, EMBASE, Scopus, Web of Science, PubPsych, and PsycINFO were searched to identify studies that either r...

Purpose Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are characterized by both aberrant regional neural activity and disrupted inter-regional functional connectivity (FC). However, the effect of AD/MCI on the coupling between regional neural activity (measured by regional fluorodeoxyglucose imaging (rFDG)) and inter-regional FC (mea...

The prevailing network perspective of Parkinson's disease (PD) emerges not least from the ascending neuropathology traceable in histological studies. However, whether longitudinal in vivo correlates of network degeneration in PD can be observed remains unresolved. Here, we applied a trimodal imaging protocol combining 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-a...

Behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is characterized by neurodegeneration in the frontal and anterior temporal lobes leading to insidious and progressive changes in behavior, personality and social functions. The individual neuroimaging studies in bvFTD point to divergent findings. Thus, quantitative assessment of neural abnormalitie...

Sleep problems can affect many aspects of human life. One of the most prevalent and serious problems that are associated with sleep problems is depressive symptoms. Although several studies have revealed the association between sleep disturbances and depressive symptoms, their underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Hence, in this study, we ai...

Over the past decades, numerous neuroimaging studies have been conducted in insomnia disorder (ID), which yielded divergent findings. Interestingly, no consistent regional abnormality has been observed in our previous neuroimaging meta-analysis (Masoud et al. 2018). Thus, we revisited our former meta-analysis by including recent ID studies to updat...

Introduction: Numerous studies have reported brain alterations in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). However, they pointed to inconsistent findings. Methods: We used a meta-analytic approach to identify the convergent structural and functional brain abnormalities in bvFTD. Following current best-practice neuroimaging meta-analys...

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2022.05.023

It is unclear to what extent the absence of vision affects the sensory sensitivity for oneiric construction. Similarly, the presence of visual imagery in the mentation of dreams of congenitally blind people has been largely disputed. We investigate the presence and nature of oneiric visuo-spatial impressions by analysing the dreams of the congenita...

Humans need about seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Sleep habits are heritable, associated with brain function and structure, and intrinsically related to well-being, mental, and physical health. However, the biological basis of the interplay of sleep and health is incompletely understood. Here we show, by combining neuroimaging and behaviora...

Narcolepsy, as a second prevalent sleep disorder, is characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, lack of muscle tone triggered by strong emotions (i.e., cataplexy), sleep paralysis, and hallucinations. Narcolepsy impairs quality of life and productivity of patients, and increases the risk of accidents. Several structural and functional neuroimag...

In the present study, we performed a meta-analysis of structural MRI using three international cohorts within the ENIGMA-Sleep working group (N=912) to measure cortical and subcortical brain changes between subjects with and without insomnia symptoms.

These authors have contributed equally to this work Insomnia disorder (ID) is characterized by problems in initiating or maintaining sleep or early morning awakening. The daytime consequences are fatigue, mood disturbance, and cognitive impairment. The second version of the International Classification of Sleep Disorders (ICSD) criteria introduced...

Several neuroimaging studies have investigated localized aberrations in brain structure, function or connectivity in late-life depression, but the ensuing results are equivocal and often conflicting. Here, we provide a quantitative consolidation of neuroimaging in late-life depression using coordinate-based meta-analysis by searching multiple datab...

Despite the adverse consequences of insomnia disorder for both individuals and society, the underlying neurobiological processes are poorly understood. The purpose was to further understand the alterations of white matter tracts in patients with insomnia and their association with sleep variables and also to determine if diffusion tensor imaging me...

Ineffective use of adaptive cognitive strategies (e.g., reappraisal) to regulate emotional states is often reported in a wide variety of psychiatric disorders, suggesting a common characteristic across different diagnostic categories. However, the extent of shared neurobiological impairments is incompletely understood. This study, therefore, aimed...

Freezing of gait is a common phenomenon of advanced Parkinson’s disease. Besides locomotor function per se, a role of cognitive deficits has been suggested. Limited evidence of associated dopaminergic deficits points to caudatal denervation. Further, altered functional connectivity within resting-state networks with importance for cognitive functio...

Background Impaired self-awareness of cognitive deficits (ISAcog) has rarely been investigated in Parkinson's disease (PD). ISAcog is associated with poorer long-term outcome in other diseases. This study examines ISAcog in PD with and without mild cognitive impairment (PD-MCI), compared to healthy controls, and its clinical-behavioral and neuroima...

Purpose: Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a syndrome at-risk for AD, are characterized by both aberrant regional neural activity and disrupted inter-regional functional connectivity (FC). It is, however, not clear how aberrant regional neural activity and inter-regional FC interact across MCI and AD. Thus, we investigat...

Insomnia disorder (ID) is a common illness associated with mood and cognitive impairments. Subtyping ID is an ongoing debate in sleep medicine, but the underlying mechanisms of each subtype is poorly understood. Growing evidence suggests that subcortical brain structures play the key roles in pathophysiology of ID and its subtypes. Here, we aimed t...

INTRODUCTION: Numerous studies have reported brain alterations in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). However, they pointed to inconsistent findings. METHODS: We used a meta-analytic approach to identify the convergent structural and functional brain abnormalities in bvFTD. Following the best-practice neuroimaging meta-analysis guid...

Neuroimaging and genetics studies have advanced our understanding of the neurobiology of sleep and its disorders. However, individual studies usually have limitations to identifying consistent and reproducible effects, including modest sample sizes, heterogeneous clinical characteristics and varied methodologies. These issues call for a large‐scale...

Involvement of the default mode network (DMN) in cognitive symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD) has been reported by resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) studies. However, the relation to metabolic measures obtained by [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) is largely unknown. We applied multimodal resting-state network an...

PurposeTau pathology progression in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is explained through the network degeneration hypothesis and the neuropathological Braak stages; however, the compatibility of these models remains unclear.Methods We utilized [18F]AV-1451 tau-PET scans of 39 subjects with AD and 39 sex-matched amyloid-negative healthy controls (HC) in th...

Abstract This review summarizes the last decade of work by the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium, a global alliance of over 1400 scientists across 43 countries, studying the human brain in health and disease. Building on large-scale genetic studies that discovered the first robustly replicated genetic loci as...

Dysfunctions in bottom-up emotion processing (EP), as well as top-down emotion regulation (ER) are prominent features in pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). Nonetheless, it is not clear whether EP- and ER-related areas are regionally and/or connectively disturbed in MDD. In addition, it is yet to be known how EP- and ER-related area...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common psychiatric disorder with several comorbidities (e.g., sleep disturbances). However, no convergent quantitative finding exists despite the well-documented link between PTSD and insomnia. Hence, a meta-analysis was conducted to examine the aggregate association and the magnitude of insomnia in PTSD. H...

Cognitive emotion regulation (i.e., reappraisal) impairment is a key feature in a wide variety of mental disorders, suggesting common nature of disruption across psychiatric diagnoses. However, the extent of potential shared neurobiological disturbances related to reappraisal impairment is incompletely understood. This study, therefore, aimed to id...

Several neuroimaging studies have investigated localized aberrations in brain structure, function or connectivity in late-life depression, but the ensuing results are equivocal and often conflicting. Here, we provide a quantitative consolidation of neuroimaging in late-life depression using coordinate-based meta-analysis by searching multiple datab...

Purpose of review: Previous research has struggled with identifying clear-cut, objective counterparts to subjective distress in insomnia. Approaching this discrepancy with a focus on hyperarousal and dysfunctional affective processes, studies examining brain structures and neural networks involved in affect and arousal are reviewed and conclusions...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Background Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a common sleep disorder, which causes wide range of neurological and psychiatric symptoms. Several studies demonstrated structural and functional brain alterations using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques. Recently, diffusion-based brain MRI studies in patients with OSA showed changes in diffusio...

Dysfunctions in bottom-up emotion processing (EP), as well as top-down emotion regulation (ER) are prominent features in pathophysiology of major depressive disorder (MDD). Nonetheless, it is not clear whether EP-and ER-related areas are regionally and/or connectively disturbed, and how they are interactively linked to abnormal affective symptoms o...

Humans need about seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Sleep habits are heritable, associated with brain function and structure, and intrinsically related to well-being, mental, and physical health. However, the biological basis of the interplay of sleep and health is incompletely understood. Here we show, by combining neuroimaging and behaviora...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and sleep‐disordered breathing (SDB) are prevalent conditions with a rising burden. It is suggested that SDB may contribute to cognitive decline and advanced aging. Here, we assessed the link between self‐reported SDB and gray matter volume in patients with AD, mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and healthy controls (HCs). We...

The spreading hypothesis of neurodegeneration assumes an expansion of neural pathologies along existing neural pathways. Multimodal neuroimaging studies have demonstrated distinct topographic patterns of cerebral pathologies in neurodegeneration. For Parkinson's disease the hypothesis so far rests largely on histopathological evidence of α-synuclei...

Aim: Many neuroimaging studies have been done, to illustrate the neuropathology of chronic insomnia, as one of the most common psychological disorders. Recent studies, emphasize the role of the orbitofrontal cortex. But the functional connectivity of OFC hasn’t been studied yet. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first study to discuss it. M...

It is suggested that sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) may contribute to cognitive decline and advanced aging as present in Alzheimer’s diseases (AD). Hereby we used a machine learning approach to assess the ageing properties of participants brain with history of self-reported SDB. A total of 330 participants, matched for age and gender, from Alzhei...

Late-life depression (LLD) is turning into a health concern with the aging of the population. Its unique presentation with somatic symptoms and cognitive dysfunction highlights the need to study LLD as a distinct disease process from depression in younger adults. Numerous functional and structural neuroimaging studies have investigated the neural c...