Disrupted sleep may be early sign of Alzheimer's

Sleep loss may be an early symptom of Alzheimer's disease, a new study has warned.
Sleep is disrupted in people who likely have early Alzheimer's disease but do not yet have the memory loss or other cognitive problems characteristic of full-blown disease, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have found.
The finding confirms earlier observations by some of the same researchers. Those studies showed a link in mice between sleep loss and brain plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease.
Early evidence tentatively suggests the connection may work in both directions: Alzheimer's plaques disrupt sleep, and lack of sleep promotes Alzheimer's plaques.

"This link may provide us with an easily detectable sign of Alzheimer's pathology," said senior author David M Holtzman, the Andrew B and Gretchen P Jones Professor and head of Washington University's Department of Neurology.
"As we start to treat people who have markers of early Alzheimer's, changes in sleep in response to treatments may serve as an indicator of whether the new treatments are succeeding," Holtzman said in a statement.

Sleep problems are common in people who have symptomatic Alzheimer's disease, but scientists recently have begun to suspect that they also may be an indicator of early disease.
The new paper in journal JAMA Neurology is among the first to connect early Alzheimer's disease and sleep disruption in humans.

For the new study, researchers recruited 145 volunteers from the University's Charles F and Joanne Knight Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. All of the volunteers were 45 to 75 years old and cognitively normal when they enrolled.
As a part of other research at the center, scientists already had analysed samples of the volunteers' spinal fluids for markers of Alzheimer's disease.
The samples showed that 32 participants had preclinical Alzheimer's disease, meaning they were likely to have amyloid plaques present in their brains but were not yet cognitively impaired.
Participants kept daily sleep diaries for two weeks, noting the time they went to bed and got up, the number of naps taken on the previous day, and other information.

The researchers tracked the participants' activity levels using sensors worn on the wrist that detected the wearer's movements.
Participants who had preclinical Alzheimer's disease had poorer sleep efficiency (80.4 per cent) than people without markers of Alzheimer's (83.7 per cent).
"When we looked specifically at the worst sleepers, those with a sleep efficiency lower than 75 per cent, they were more than five times more likely to have preclinical Alzheimer's disease than good sleepers," first author Yo-El Ju said.