Trial reportJournal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine2023
Acoustic stimulation as a promising technique to enhance slow-wave sleep in Alzheimer's disease: results of a pilot study.
Trial report in Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 21 citations in OpenAlex.
- Cardiovascular Responses to Natural and Auditory Evoked Slow Waves Predict Post-Sleep Cardiac Function.Journal of sleep research · 2026Trial
- One night of closed-loop auditory stimulation during sleep enhances memory consolidation in patients with Alzheimer's Disease.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Smart Wearable EEG Devices: A Review of Lightweight, Multi-Sensor Systems for Sleep and Everyday Neurophysiology.Biosensors · 2026Review
- Circadian Rhythms in Aging and Age-Related Neurogenerative Disease.Current sleep medicine reports · 2025Article
- Noradrenergic Slow Vasomotion: The Hidden Fluid Pump Linking Sleep, Brain Clearance, and Dementia Pathogenesis.International journal of molecular sciences · 2025Review
- Perivascular brain clearance as a therapeutic target in cerebral amyloid angiopathy and Alzheimer's disease.Neurotherapeutics : the journal of the American Society for Experimental NeuroTherapeutics · 2025Review
- Transforming Sleep Monitoring: Review of Wearable and Remote Devices Advancing Home Polysomnography and Their Role in Predicting Neurological Disorders.Biosensors · 2025Review
- Glymphatic system in neurological disorders and implications for brain health.Frontiers in neurology · 2025Article
- Article
- A personalized semi-automatic sleep spindle detection (PSASD) framework.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2024Article
- Unraveling the potential of acoustic stimulation to enhance slow-wave sleep in Alzheimer's disease: implications and pathways forward.Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2024Article
- Slow-wave sleep and subsequent risk of dementia.Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2024Article
- Acoustic stimulation as a promising technique to improve glymphatic clearance in the human brain?Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2024Article
- Could immersive sound improve glymphatic function in the awake brain?Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2024Article
- Associations of sleep disorders with all-cause MCI/dementia and different types of dementia - clinical evidence, potential pathomechanisms and treatment options: A narrative review.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Review
- From macro to micro: slow-wave sleep and its pivotal health implications.Frontiers in sleep · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
15 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
STUDY
objectivesSleep disturbances are common in people with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and a reduction in slow-wave activity is the most striking underlying change. Acoustic stimulation has emerged as a promising approach to enhance slow-wave activity in healthy adults and people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment. In this phase 1 study we investigated, for the first time, the feasibility of acoustic stimulation in AD and piloted the effect on slow-wave sleep (SWS).
methodsEleven adults with mild to moderate AD first wore the DREEM 2 headband for 2 nights to establish a baseline registration. Using machine learning, the DREEM 2 headband automatically scores sleep stages in real time. Subsequently, the participants wore the headband for 14 consecutive "stimulation nights" at home. During these nights, the device applied phase-locked acoustic stimulation of 40-dB pink noise delivered over 2 bone-conductance transducers targeted to the up-phase of the delta wave or SHAM, if it detected SWS in sufficiently high-quality data.
resultsResults of the DREEM 2 headband algorithm show a significant average increase in SWS (minutes) [
conclusionsOur phase 1 study provided the first evidence that targeted acoustic stimuli is feasible and could increase SWS in AD significantly. Future studies should further test and optimize the effect of stimulation on SWS in AD in a large randomized controlled trial. CITATION: Van den Bulcke L, Peeters A-M, Heremans E, et al. Acoustic stimulation as a promising technique to enhance slow-wave sleep in Alzheimer's disease: results of a pilot study.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.