
An international team led by researchers Laura Stankeviciute and Oriol Grau, from the Pasqual Maragall Foundation research center, the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research Center (BBRC), together with Jonathan Blackman, from the North Bristol NHS hospital Trust and the University of Bristol, has shown an association between sleep quality and Alzheimer’s disease-related pathology in people without cognitive impairment.
The results of the analysis, which is part of the European Prevention of Alzheimer’s Dementia Longitudinal Cohort Study (EPAD LCS), have been published in the scientific journal Brain Communications, and indicate that poor sleep quality is related to an increase in pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. This finding is relevant to help define future therapies, so that they can be targeted at the appropriate phase of the disease.
Congratulations to all authors: Jonathan Blackman, Laura Stankeviciute, Eider M Arenaza-Urquijo, Marc Suárez-Calvet, Gonzalo Sánchez-Benavides, Natalia Vilor-Tejedor, Alejandro Iranzo, José Luis Molinuevo, Juan Domingo Gispert, Elizabeth Coulthard, Oriol Grau-Rivera.
“The epidemiological and experimental data available to date already suggested that sleep abnormalities contribute to the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. However, previous studies had limitations due to the lack of biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, because they had a non-cross-sectional design, or because of the small size of the sample of participants”, explains Laura Stankeviciute, a predoctoral researcher at the BBRC and one of the main authors of the study.
“Through these analyses, we have been able to study associations between the main biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease and different measures of sleep quality, such as its total score, duration, efficiency and alteration”, specifies Dr. Oriol Grau, head of the Clinical Research Group and Risk Factors for Neurogegenerative Diseases of the BBRC.
You can read the article here: https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcac257
You can find the press release published by BBRC here: https://www.barcelonabeta.org/en/news/news/association-between-poor-sleep-quality-and-increased-risk-developing-Alzheimers