Poster | Poster Session 06 Program Schedule
02/15/2024
04:00 pm - 05:15 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)
Poster Session 06: Aging | MCI | Neurodegenerative Disease - PART 2
Final Abstract #17
Association of Sleep Behaviors with Cerebral White Matter Hyperintensity Volume in Healthy Middle-Aged to Older Adults
Madeline Ally, University of Arizona, Tucson, United States Daniel Aslan, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States M. Katherine Sayre, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States Pradyumna Bharadwaj, University of Arizona, Tucson, United States Silvio Maltagliati, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States Mark Lai, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States Rand Wilcox, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States Yann Klimentidis, University of Arizona, Tucson, United States David Raichlen, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, United States Gene Alexander, University of Arizona, Tucson, United States
Category: Aging
Keyword 1: sleep
Keyword 2: neuroimaging: structural
Keyword 3: aging (normal)
Objective:
As dementia prevalence is expected to grow rapidly in the coming decades, recent efforts have focused on understanding how different lifestyle factors influence brain aging. Poor sleep quality, in particular, has been associated with cognitive decline and increased risk for age-related neurodegenerative disease, however the mechanisms driving this relationship are not fully understood. White matter hyperintensity volume (WMHV) measured on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reflects an important cerebrovascular health factor that has been associated with neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia, and has also been commonly observed in healthy aging. As such, we investigated the relationship between self-reported sleep behaviors and WMHV to better understand the role of sleep quality in brain aging and the risk for neurodegenerative disease.
Participants and Methods:
This study included 10,444 middle-aged to older adults from the UK Biobank screened to exclude reported major medical (including sleep disorders), neurological, and psychiatric disorders. All participants underwent T1 and T2 FLAIR MRI brain scans and a measure of total WMHV was computed using BIANCA software. We evaluated history of five binary self-reported sleep behaviors: (1) hours of sleep/night (below/above versus achieving a 7-hour/night recommendation), (2) daytime napping (never/rarely versus sometimes/usually), (3) sleeplessness (never/rarely versus sometimes/usually), (4) snoring (no versus yes), and (5) daytime dozing (never/rarely versus sometimes/often). Multiple linear regression tested the association between each sleep behavior and log-transformed WMHV, while controlling for total intracranial volume (TIV), demographic and imaging acquisition variables (i.e., age, sex, ethnicity, education, Townsend Deprivation Index, imaging center location, and days between baseline and imaging visits), and current depressed mood and alcohol use. In follow-up analyses, we adjusted for common vascular health and lifestyle factors associated with brain aging and dementia risk (i.e., self-reported hypertension, diabetes, smoking, weekly moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, measured body mass index, and apolipoprotein E (APOE) ε4 carrier status).
Results:
The mean (SD) age of the sample was 62.84 (7.53) years, 5,608 were female (53.7%), 10,240 (98.0%) were white, 5,381 (51.5%) had at least a college education, and 2,855 (27.3%) were APOE ε4 carriers. When controlling for TIV, demographics, imaging acquisition, current depressed mood, and alcohol use, sleep behaviors of greater napping (b=0.069, 95% CI[0.035, 0.103], p<.001), sleeplessness (b=0.041, 95% CI[0.005, 0.078], p=.026), and snoring (b=0.068, 95% CI[0.034, 0.103], p<.001) were associated with greater WMHV, but hours of sleep/night (p=.102) and daytime dozing (p=.369) were not. However, when we controlled for other vascular health/lifestyle factors, only napping was significantly associated with greater WMHV (b=0.046, CI[0.012, 0.080], p=.007).
Conclusions:
In a large, community-dwelling cohort of healthy middle-aged to older adults, napping during the day was associated with increased cerebral WMHV, even after accounting for other common vascular health/lifestyle factors. Napping may represent a unique sleep-related marker of brain aging, providing a link between an aspect of sleep quality and white matter pathology that, in turn, may reflect a potential mechanistic pathway in the observed relationship between poor sleep and dementia risk. Further research is needed to address causality and to investigate how longitudinal clinical outcomes are influenced by this sleep behavior.
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