Scaling behavior of EEG amplitude and frequency time series across sleep stages

We study short-term and long-term persistence properties (related with auto-correlations) of amplitudes and frequencies of EEG oscillations in 176 healthy subjects and 40 patients during nocturnal sleep. The amplitudes show scaling from 2 to 500 seconds (depending on the considered band) with large fluctuation exponents during (nocturnal) wakefulness (0.73–0.83) and small ones during deep sleep (0.50–0.69). Light sleep is similar to deep sleep, while REM sleep (0.64–0.76) is closer to wakefulness except for the EEG γ band. Some of the frequency time series also show long-term scaling, depending on the selected bands and stages. Only minor deviations are seen for patients with depression, anxiety, or Parkinson's disease