In a new study from Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers found certain brain wave patterns that occur while an individual sleeps may be assessed by clinicians to help them diagnose dementia and other conditions related to memory, language, and thinking.
The finding could help improve automated methods for detecting these brain wave patterns, or sleep spindles, and for correlating them with cognitive function.
Sleep spindles are bursts of brain activity that occur during non-REM sleep and can be assessed through electroencephalograms (EECs) involving non-invasive electrodes placed on the scalp.
Spindles are considered a “fingerprint” that vary among individuals, are highly heritable, and tend to be consistent from night to night.
With the rising burden of neurodegenerative disease, there is a pressing need for a sensitive biomarker of cognition.
This has led to a surge of research examining sleep spindles, an oscillatory pattern of brain activity observed during sleep, and their role in various neuropsychiatric conditions and cognitive performance.
Sleep spindles are typically analyzed through visual inspection of EEGs, but automated methods can offer more consistent results.
In the study, the team designed sleep-related experiments involving 167 adults to see the association between sleep spindle features and cognition and identified parameters that best correlate with cognitive performance.
The team also found that sleep spindles were most strongly linked with what’s known as fluid intelligence, which relies on abstract thinking and problem-solving skills and declines during the early stages of dementia.
By optimizing the detection of this proposed sleep-based biomarker of cognition, they hope to guide future studies that examine the sensitivity of this biomarker in neurodegenerative populations.
The team says sleep spindles are one among many important measurable features of brain activity during sleep that provide a window into the brain’s current state of health and individuals’ risk for developing brain disease or cognitive decline.
These indicators will be essential tools in the quest to develop treatments that can preserve and enhance brain health.
If you care about sleep quality, please read studies about how to sleep to prevent Alzheimer’s disease, and herb that could help you sleep well at night.
For more information about brain health, please see recent studies about high blood pressure drug that could treat vascular dementia, and results showing this diet could protect against memory loss and dementia.
The study is published in Sleep. One author of the study is Noor Adra.
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