UMass Amherst researchers will soon start tracking sleep patterns among people already at risk of Alzheimer's as a way to flag early signs of the disease.
UMass biomedical engineer Joyita Dutta, lead researcher on the study, said sleep disruption is known to be one early sign of Alzheimer's disease, even before cognitive decline.
"And then once somebody is on the Alzheimer's spectrum, they could actually also move on to having new sleep related disruptions," she said. "So there is a very complex relationship between sleep and dementia that we're still trying to understand."
Dutta said the 5-year study will not be looking at the general population; participants will all have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer's.
They will wear devices that track their sleep and heart rate over long periods of time. That data would then be combined with other neurological and blood tests, in addition to clinical assessments, as a way to help narrow down the search for biomarkers for the disease.
Dutta said new drugs to slow down the progression of Alzheimer's have been shown to work best when the disease is identified early, although she acknowledged that there is debate over the effectiveness of the current medications.
"We are still at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to therapeutics, but it is an emerging area," she said. "So even for recruiting people to clinical trials, we need to target people who are kind of on the verge of developing dementia, but not quite there yet."
The study, which will start recruiting participants this fall, is funded by a $3.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.
