What is Sleep's Role in Alzheimer's Disease? Insight From Healthy Aging
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Summary
The specific objective of this proposed research is to understand whether deficits in sleep-dependent memory changes reflect age-related changes in sleep, memory, or both. The central hypothesis is that changes in both memory and sleep contribute to age-related changes in sleep-dependent memory processing. To this end, the investigators will investigate changes in learning following intervals of sleep (overnight and nap) and wake in young and older adults.
Description
Exp 1: Using neuroimaging, the investigators will consider whether differences in brain areas engaged during memory encoding contribute to age-related changes in sleep-dependent memory consolidation for a word-pair learning task. Exp 2: The investigators will examine the rate of memory decay between encoding and sleep using two probes of declarative memory (word-pair learning and visuo-spatial learning). Exp 3: The investigators will provide additional opportunity for encoding of the word-pair and visuo-spatial learning tasks. Exp 4: Using neuroimaging, the investigators will examine neural…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 18–80 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Yes
Inclusion Criteria: * Age 18-80 yrs * Healthy sleeper * No diagnosed sleep or neurodegenerative disorder Exclusion Criteria: 1. Past diagnosis of any sleep disorder or evidence of a sleep disorder as assessed by self-reported sleep quality assessments, a standardized diagnostic interview, and an acclimation night of polysomnography. Using acclimation-night polysomnography, participants will be excluded with an Apnea-Hypopnea Index \>15; a Period-Limb Movement in Sleep index of \>15/hr; sleep-onset latency \> 45 min (indicative of insomnia); or sleep efficiency \< 80% (see Edinger et al., Sl…
Interventions
- BehavioralSleep
Participants will sleep (either a mid-day nap or normal overnight sleep)
Location
- University of MassachusettsAmherst, Massachusetts