Sleep and dementia

TEAMS https://bit.ly/3oK04EX

Summary
Poor sleep is a well-known symptom of dementia but its role in dementia onset is less well understood. Dr Sabia will begin by presenting a short introduction on the timeline of dementia pathogenesis. She will then discuss the current evidence on the link between sleep and dementia and findings from her recent study showing short sleep duration in midlife to be associated with dementia onset later in life. This study used repeated data on sleep duration from 8000 participants from the Whitehall II study to explore the association between sleep duration at age 50, 60 and 70 and subsequent risk of dementia.

About the speaker:
Dr Séverine Sabia is researcher in Epidemiology at UCL and Inserm (French National institute of health and medical research).

The core of her work is on the impact of health behaviours on aging outcomes. She has been at the forefront of research by proposing a new analytical approach to gain insight into the nature of the association between risk factors and dementia. This approach considers time between a putative risk factor and dementia onset by examining 1) trajectories of risk factors in the three decades preceding dementia diagnosis, and 2) associations between risk factors at 50, 60, and 70 years and incident dementia using time to event analysis. This has enabled her to uncover biobehavioural factors over the adult lifecourse that shape the risk of dementia. Since 2012, she has also led the Whitehall II accelerometer sub-study. These objective measures on 4000 older adults allow an in-depth characterization of physical activity, sedentary behaviour, and sleep, and their association with health.