Working across biobanks to show just how important sleep is to your brain across your lifespan [preprint].

New pre-print combining data from Wales, Finland and the UK as part of our ongoing collaborations across DataTenica, UKDRI and the NIH.

We evaluate the potential associations between sleep disturbances and lifetime brain health in over 2M individuals. We also see that “all roads lead to Rome” where exposures like sleep disturbances might compensate for low genetic risk in some instances of neurodegenerative disease manifestation.

Check it out here.

Summary of the study design above.

Some highlights include:

●  Sleep disorders, particularly sleep apnea, are associated with the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and vascular dementia in national scale biobanks.

●  These sleep disorders imparted significant risk up to 15 years before the onset of a neurodegenerative disease.

●  The cumulative number of sleep disorders in the electronic health records were associated with a higher risk of neurodegeneration related to dementia and vascular dementia.

●  Sleep related risk factors are independent of genetic risk for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, potentially compensating for low genetic risk in overall disease etiology.

●  Significant multiplicative interaction exists regarding the combined risk of sleep disorders and Parkinson’s disease.

Parkinson’s disease genetic risk distributions among people with the G47 ICD10 code element in their EMR are lower than those without the sleep disorder.

We see a similar association in Alzheimer’s disease, where people with the sleep exposure have a lower genetic risk but still develop the disease.

In particular, if you are at low genetic risk, sleep may be an even more important modifiable risk factor to consider for neurodegeneration.