ArticleNeurology2026
Association of Sleep Spindle Activity With Cognitive Decline in Early Clinical Stages of Alzheimer Disease.
Article in Neurology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- A gradual and sustainable approach to diagnosing sleep and circadian disturbances in dementia.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Review
- Longitudinal Alterations in Sleep EEG Biomarkers of Memory Consolidation in Middle-Aged and Older Adults.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Long-term forgetting, sleep, and tau in autosomal-dominant Alzheimer's disease.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND
objectivesSleep architecture, including spindles and slow oscillations, is disrupted in Alzheimer disease (AD). How changes in these sleep elements relate to cognitive decline is less clear. Our objectives were to examine changes in sleep macroarchitecture and microarchitecture in early clinical stages of AD compared with older adult controls (CTLs) and to investigate their associations with longitudinal cognitive change.
methodsThis was both a cross-sectional and longitudinal study performed at Mass General Brigham Hospitals, where participants with early AD or CTLs underwent overnight ambulatory scalp EEG and longitudinal cognitive testing. We compared sleep microarchitectural features extracted from the EEG, including spindle activity, across the brain topography and between groups. We then performed longitudinal analyses using mixed-effects models to test the association of these sleep features with changes in cognition on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), collected annually for up to 7 years.
resultsAD (n = 47, mean age 74.1 years, 66% female) and CTL (n = 43, mean age 72.6 years, 56% female) groups spent a similar proportion of sleep time in each stage of sleep. Sleep efficiency, however, was lower in the AD group (mean: CTL 75.1% vs AD 70.9%; DISCUSSION: Temporal lobe sleep spindle activity is reduced in early clinical stages of AD and is associated with a faster rate of cognitive decline. Our results underscore the importance of including temporal lobe measurements when assessing sleep neurophysiology in AD, which is not standard in polysomnography. Future work examining the relationship between AD biomarkers and reduced spindle activity is needed to elucidate the potential mechanisms underlying these findings.
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