Citation :
Mohammediyan, B., Baril, A. A., Fajardo Valdez, A., St-Onge, F., Pichet Binette, A., Carrier, J., Geddes, M. R., Ducharme, S., Montembeault, M., Soucy, J. P., Breitner, J., Poirier, J., Villeneuve, S., & PREVENT‐AD Research Group (2026). Longitudinal association between sleep and Alzheimer’s pathology. Alzheimer’s & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, 22(3), e71228. https://doi.org/10.1002/alz.71228
Full text : Here
Bery Mohammediyan, Andrée‐Ann Baril, Alfonso Fajardo Valdez, Frédéric St‐Onge, Alexa Pichet Binette, Julie Carrier, Maiya R Geddes, Simon Ducharme, Maxime Montembeault, Jean‐Paul Soucy, John Breitner, Judes Poirier, Sylvia Villeneuve; for the PREVENT‐AD Research Group
published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, March 2026.
ABSTRACT :
Introduction Since sleep disturbance is a modifiable risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), we tested associations between sleep and AD pathology in cognitively unimpaired (CU) persons.
Methods We included 223 participants from the PREVENT‐AD cohort with self‐reported measures of sleep, objective actigraphy measures of sleep, and positron emission tomography (PET) scans for AD pathology quantification. Repeated PET scans (mean follow‐up: 4.31 ± 0.55 years) were available for 103 participants. We conducted robust linear models (RLM) for cross‐sectional analyses and RLMs using the annual change in AD pathology for longitudinal analyses.
Results All actigraphy‐based sleep variability measures were associated with tau burden (duration: β = 0.121 [95% confidence interval {CI} = 0.010; 0.232], p = 0.034; efficiency: 0.122 [0.010; 0.235], 0.033; fragmentation: 0.115 [0.010; 0.221], 0.033). Greater variability in sleep fragmentation was also associated with amyloid burden (0.074 [0.008; 0.140], 0.028), and variability in sleep efficiency portended amyloid burden and faster accumulation over time (0.075 [0.009; 0.141], 0.026; 0.164 [0.008; 0.320], 0.039; respectively).
Discussion Irregularity in sleep patterns is associated with higher pathological burden and faster amyloid accumulation.