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Disrupted sleep may predict Alzheimer’s Poor sleep patterns linked to formation of Alzheimers plaques. 18 October 2012 New Orleans, Louisiana Disturbed sleep paterns can predict a future Alzheimers diagnosis. Steve Prezant/Corbis A disturbed nights sleep might signal a future diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, according to findings presented this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans, Louisiana. Patients with Alzheimer’s often complain of changes in their sleep patterns during the early stages of the disease. In healthy people, for example, daytime naps usually last around 20 minutes, but they can be to 3 hours long in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Roxanne Sterniczuk, a neurophysiologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and her colleagues wanted to determine how early these changes occur and if they could predict a person’s future risk of developing the disease. Sterniczuk and her colleagues analysed data from around 14,600 healthy people, collected as part of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), a long-term observational study of people aged 50 and over from 12 European countries. They looked at various measures of sleep quality, and used them to produce a ‘sleep disturbance index’. The researchers found that participants who reported sleeping restlessly, feeling tired during the day and taking sleep medication were more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s within the next 2 years, and that the greater the extent of these problems, the more severe were the symptoms of the subsequent disease. “Increased daytime sleepiness was the biggest predictor,” says Sterniczuk. “It would appear that subtle changes in the sleep–wake cycle are taking place before any disease pathology.” Early marker Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by two hallmarks — the deposition of insoluble plaques made up of amyloid- ? protein, which accumulate in the spaces around nerve cells, and protein aggregates cal