Introduction: Sleep is increasingly recognized as a major risk factor for neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Methods: Using an magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based AD score based on clinical data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative 1 (ADNI1) case-control cohort, we investigated the associations between polysomnography-based sleep macro-architecture and AD-related brain atrophy patterns in 712 pre-symptomatic, healthy subjects from the population-based Study of Health in Pomerania.
Results: We identified a robust inverse association between slow-wave sleep and the AD marker (estimate: -0.019; 95% confidence interval: -0.03 to -0.0076; false discovery rate [FDR] = 0.0041), as well as with gray matter (GM) thicknesses in typical individual cortical AD-signature regions. No effects were identified regarding rapid eye movement or non-rapid eye movement (NREM) stage 2 sleep, and NREM stage 1 was positively associated with GM thickness, mainly in the prefrontal cortical regions.
Discussion: There is a cross-sectional relationship between AD-related neurodegenerative patterns and the proportion of sleep spent in slow-wave sleep.
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease; general population‐based cohort; magnetic resonance imaging; pre‐symptomatic Alzheimer's disease marker; sleep macro‐architecture; slow‐wave sleep.
© 2022 The Authors. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring published by Wiley Periodicals, LLC on behalf of Alzheimer's Association.