Neural Noise- Multi-channel fNIRS has been used to study cortical activation and functional connectivity during a verbal fluency task in patients with chronic insomnia.1
- The methods are relevant for neuroimaging and clinical sleep/psychiatry; primary focus is insomnia.1
- Reported in Nature; tier-2.1 1
Weekly enrichment (2026-07-20)
- A multi-channel fNIRS study compared 81 chronic insomnia disorder (CID) patients against 100 healthy controls during a verbal fluency task, making it one of the largest fNIRS insomnia cohorts to date.23
- CID patients showed significantly reduced bilateral prefrontal activation (p < 0.01), most prominently in the left inferior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and superior frontal gyrus.2
- Interregional functional connectivity was 32–45% weaker in CID patients than in controls.2
- Left IFG activation correlated negatively with sleep latency (r = -0.32) and positively with sleep duration (r = 0.28), while right SFG activation correlated with sleep efficiency (r = 0.31).2
- Left superior frontal gyrus activation alone gave fair-to-good discrimination between groups (ROC AUC = 0.79).2
- A multivariate model combining all six prefrontal regions of interest raised the AUC to 0.84, and further adding behavioral performance and clinical scale scores reached AUC = 0.91.2
- The earlier NIRS report on this cohort used general linear modeling for activation and correlation matrices for connectivity, finding hypoactivation of oxy-Hb responses in bilateral mPFC and DLPFC.3
- The authors position fNIRS prefrontal metrics as candidate objective biomarkers for CID, most useful within a multimodal diagnostic framework rather than any single metric; broader fNIRS verbal-fluency work supports its sensitivity across psychiatric disorders.24