The relationship between Alzheimer's‐related brain atrophy patterns and sleep macro‐architecture

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.