Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Short Communication
  • Published:

Sleep and meal-time misalignment alters functional connectivity: a pilot resting-state study

International Journal of Obesity volume 40, pages 1813–1816 (2016)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Delayed sleep and meal times promote metabolic dysregulation and obesity. Altered coordination of sleeping and eating times may impact food-reward valuation and interoception in the brain, yet the independent and collective contributions of sleep and meal times are unknown. This randomized, in-patient crossover study experimentally manipulates sleep and meal times while preserving sleep duration (7.05±0.44 h for 5 nights). Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans (2 × 5-minute runs) were obtained for four participants (three males; 25.3±4.6 years), each completing all study phases (normal sleep/normal meal; late sleep/normal meal; normal sleep/late meal; and late sleep/late meal). Normal mealtimes were 1, 5, 11 and 12.5 h after awakening; late mealtimes were 4.5, 8.5, 14.5 and 16 h after awakening. Seed-based resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) was computed for a priori regions-of-interest (seeds) and contrasted across conditions. Statistically significant (P<0.05, whole-brain corrected) regionally specific effects were found for multiple seeds. The strongest effects were linked to the amygdala: increased RSFC for late versus normal mealtimes (equivalent to skipping breakfast). A main effect of sleep and interaction with meal time were also observed. Preliminary findings support the feasibility of examining the effects of sleep and meal-time misalignment, independent of sleep duration, on RSFC in regions relevant to food reward and interoception.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1
Figure 2

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Baron KG, Reid KJ, Kern AS, Zee PC . Role of sleep timing in caloric intake and BMI. Obesity 2011; 19: 1374–1381.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. St-Onge M-P, Roberts AL, Chen J, Kelleman M, O’Keeffe M, RoyChoudhury A et al. Short sleep duration increases energy intakes but does not change energy expenditure in normal-weight individuals. Am J Clin Nutr 2011; 94: 410–416.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Karlsson B . Is there an association between shift work and having a metabolic syndrome? Results from a population based study of 27485 people. Occup Environ Med 2001; 58: 747–752.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  4. Leidy HJ, Lepping RJ, Savage CR, Harris CT . Neural responses to visual food stimuli after a normal vs. higher protein breakfast in breakfast-skipping teens: A pilot fMRI study. Obesity 2011; 19: 2019–2025.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  5. Lucassen EA, Zhao X, Rother KI, Mattingly MS, Courville AB, de Jonge L et al. Evening chronotype is associated with changes in eating behavior, more sleep apnea, and increased stress hormones in short sleeping obese individuals. PLoS One 2013; 8: e56519.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Rolls ET . Taste, olfactory, and food reward value processing in the brain. Prog Neurobiol 2015; 127-128: 64–90.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. van Meer F, van der Laan LN, Adan RAH, Viergever MA, Smeets PAM . What you see is what you eat: An ALE meta-analysis of the neural correlates of food viewing in children and adolescents. NeuroImage 2015; 104: 35–43.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. St-Onge M-P, Wolfe S, Sy M, Shechter A, Hirsch J . Sleep restriction increases the neuronal response to unhealthy food in normal-weight individuals. Int J Obes 2014; 38: 411–416.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. St-Onge M-P, McReynolds A, Trivedi ZB, Roberts AL, Sy M, Hirsch J . Sleep restriction leads to increased activation of brain regions sensitive to food stimuli. Am J Clin Nutr 2012; 95: 818–824.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  10. Kelly C, Castellanos FX . Strengthening connections: functional connectivity and brain plasticity. Neuropsychol Rev 2014; 24: 63–76.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Fang Z, Spaeth AM, Ma N, Zhu S, Hu S, Goel N et al. Altered salience network connectivity predicts macronutrient intake after sleep deprivation. Sci Rep 2015; 5: 8215.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Wijngaarden MA, Veer IM, Rombouts SA, van Buchem MA, Willems van Dijk K, Pijl H et al. Obesity is marked by distinct functional connectivity in brain networks involved in food reward and salience. Behav Brain Res 2015; 287: 127–134.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  13. Tregellas JR, Wylie KP, Rojas DC, Tanabe J, Martin J, Kronberg E et al. Altered default network activity in obesity. Obesity 2011; 19: 2316–2321.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Behzadi Y, Restom K, Liau J, Liu TT . A component based noise correction method (CompCor) for BOLD and perfusion based fMRI. NeuroImage 2007; 37: 90–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Reuter M, Schmansky NJ, Rosas HD, Fischl B . Within-subject template estimation for unbiased longitudinal image analysis. NeuroImage 2012; 61: 1402–1418.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Di Martino A, Scheres A, Margulies DS, Kelly C, Uddin LQ, Shehzad Z et al. Functional connectivity of human striatum: a resting state FMRI study. Cereb Cortex 2008; 18: 2735–2747.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  17. Smith SM, Nichols TE . Threshold-free cluster enhancement: addressing problems of smoothing, threshold dependence and localisation in cluster inference. NeuroImage 2009; 44: 83–98.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Winkler AM, Ridgway GR, Webster MA, Smith SM, Nichols TE . Permutation inference for the general linear model. NeuroImage 2014; 92: 381–397.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Jenkinson M, Bannister P, Brady M, Smith S . Improved optimization for the robust and accurate linear registration and motion correction of brain images. NeuroImage 2002; 17: 825–841.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Parsons MJ, Moffitt TE, Gregory AM, Goldman-Mellor S, Nolan PM, Poulton R et al. Social jetlag, obesity and metabolic disorder: investigation in a cohort study. Int J Obes 2015; 39: 842–848.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank Clare Kelly, PhD and Mariana Lazar, PhD for helpful discussions of scan sequence selection and analysis approaches, and Krishna Somandepalli, MS for assistance in data processing. NIH grant R56HL119945, New York Obesity Nutrition Research Center DK26687, and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences UL1 TR000040 (formerly the National Center for Research Resources, UL1 RR024156).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Child Study Center at NYU Langone Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    Y N Yoncheva & F X Castellanos

  2. Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY, USA

    F X Castellanos

  3. Department of Medicine, New York Obesity Research Center, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    T Pizinger, K Kovtun & M-P St-Onge

  4. Institute of Human Nutrition, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA

    M-P St-Onge

Authors
  1. Y N Yoncheva
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  2. F X Castellanos
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  3. T Pizinger
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  4. K Kovtun
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

  5. M-P St-Onge
    View author publications

    Search author on:PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to M-P St-Onge.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Supplementary Information accompanies this paper on International Journal of Obesity website

Supplementary information

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yoncheva, Y., Castellanos, F., Pizinger, T. et al. Sleep and meal-time misalignment alters functional connectivity: a pilot resting-state study. Int J Obes 40, 1813–1816 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2016.132

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ijo.2016.132

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links