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At-Home Sleep EEG Oscillations May Signal Preclinical Alzheimer Disease
Changes in at-home sleep electroencephalography (EEG) may serve as an early biomarker of neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer disease (AD), suggests a study published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.
“Memory-associated neural circuits produce oscillatory events including theta bursts (TBs), sleep spindles (SPs), and slow waves (SWs) in sleep EEG. Changes in the ‘coupling’ of these events may indicate early AD pathogenesis,” wrote corresponding author Brice V. McConnell, MD, PhD, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, Colorado, and study coauthors.
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The study included 205 aging adults who underwent at-home, single-channel sleep EEG, as well as AD biomarker testing and a Clinical Dementia Rating scale assessment. Researchers mapped participants’ SW-TB and SW-SP neural circuit coupling precision to amyloid positivity, cognitive impairment, and cerebrospinal fluid AD biomarkers.
Cognitive impairment was associated with lower TB spectral power in SW-TB neural circuit coupling, according to the study. Participants who were amyloid positive but without cognitive impairment showed lower precision in SW-TB and SW-SP coupling compared with participants who were amyloid negative.
Biomarker correlations were significant in oscillatory event coupling with cerebrospinal fluid Aβ42/Aβ40, phosphorylated-tau181, and total-tau, researchers reported.
“Our study demonstrates that memory-associated neural circuit precision is measurable within at-home, single-channel sleep EEG,” the authors wrote. “Advanced signal processing can probe the integrity of these circuits, and distinct subtypes of oscillatory events inform cerebrospinal fluid levels of core AD biomarkers and amyloid positivity among asymptomatic aging adults.”
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