Véronique Latreille: The human K-complex: Insights from combined scalp-intracranial sleep EEG recordings

Véronique Latreille

PhD, postdoctoral research fellow

Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University

Abstract: Sleep spindles and K-complexes (KCs) are a hallmark of N2 sleep. While the functional significance of spindles is comparatively well investigated, there is still ongoing debate about the role of the KC: it is unclear whether it is a cortical response to an arousing stimulus (either external or internal) or whether it has sleep-promoting properties. Invasive intracranial EEG recordings from individuals with drug-resistant epilepsy offer a unique opportunity to study in-situ human brain physiology. To better understand the function of the KC, we investigated the intracerebral correlates of spontaneous scalp KCs, and compare the intracerebral activity of scalp KCs associated or not with arousals. We propose that KCs play a dual role and display both arousal- and anti-arousal-related responses, as depending on cortical areas they are associated with either a sleep-promoting effect or an arousal-promoting effect.

Bio: Véronique Latreille is a neuropsychologist with subspecialty training in neurologic and neurodegenerative disorders. She joined Dr. Birgit Frauscher’s lab at the MNI, McGill University in 2018 as a postdoctoral research fellow. She did her Ph.D. in clinical neuropsychology at the Université de Montréal (2010-2016). Her thesis work aimed to identify sleep biomarkers of dementia development in Parkinson’s disease. From 2016-2018, she did a postdoctoral fellowship on sleep and epilepsy at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. She has been working on the relationships between sleep disorders, cognitive functioning, and seizure activity in adults with epilepsy. As part of Dr. Frauscher’s lab, her work aims to determine how epileptic activity can affect sleep-dependent memory consolidation in patients with focal drug-resistant epilepsy using invasive (intracranial EEG) and non-invasive methods (high-density EEG). Véronique was awarded several prizes and scholarships for her research contributions over the past years (i.e., CIHR and FRQS Master/Doctoral/Postdoctoral Scholarships, Guy-Bégin Prize in 2015, Future Clinical Researchers in Neurology and Neuroscience Scholarship in 2018, and Young Investigator Award from the World Sleep Society in 2019). She is the author of 26 peer-reviewed papers.