We’re thrilled to share a new paper led by Louise Pivac in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring:
“Suboptimal self-reported sleep efficiency and duration are associated with faster accumulation of brain amyloid beta in cognitively unimpaired older adults”
đź“„ Read the full article here
Can poor sleep speed up the buildup of Alzheimer’s disease pathology—even before memory problems begin? This study says yes.
Using PET imaging data collected over up to 6 years, researchers examined 189 cognitively unimpaired older adults and found that:
- Sleeping less than 6 hours was linked with faster amyloid beta accumulation in people carrying the APOE ε4 risk gene.
- Low sleep efficiency (<65%) predicted faster accumulation in the overall sample, and particularly in those without the APOE ε4 allele.
🧠Why it matters: These findings suggest that poor sleep may accelerate Alzheimer’s-related changes in the brain, even in people with no current cognitive symptoms. Notably, different sleep problems seem to affect different genetic risk groups—highlighting the potential for personalised sleep-based interventions to delay Alzheimer’s pathology.
This important study adds to the growing case for targeting sleep as an early intervention pathway in dementia prevention.