# What is sleep's role in Alzheimer's disease? Insight from healthy aging

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST · 2020 · $545,621

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Understanding changes in sleep and memory in healthy aging is critical to prevention and treatment of
diseases of aging including Alzheimer’s disease. Deficits in sleep are observed early in Alzheimer’s disease
and may even precede Alzheimer’s disease onset. Decreased cognitive abilities and a parallel decline in sleep
quantity and quality are observed even in healthy aging. Given a wealth of research in healthy young adults
and animal models illustrating a benefit of sleep on memory and other cognitive processes, the overarching
objective of this proposal is to understand whether changes in sleep account for changes in cognitive abilities
in healthy aging. The specific objective of this application is to understand factors underlying preserved and
deficient sleep-dependent memory consolidation in older adults. Specifically, studies will examine whether age-
related changes in sleep-dependent memory processing reflect changes in sleep physiology, memory
encoding, or both. Sleep’s function on declarative and procedural learning is unique, each being associated
with distinct sleep stages and physiological markers. Therefore, declarative and procedural learning will be
probed seperately. Specific Aim 1 will examine whether age-related changes in memory encoding contribute
to sleep-dependent declarative memory consolidation. Both behavioral and neural measures of memory
encoding will be examined. It is hypothesized that reduced hippocampal engagement and depth of encoding
compared to young adults underlies reduced but preserved sleep-dependent memory processing in older
adults. The secondary aim is to examine sleep microstructure associated with age-related changes in memory
consolidation. Specific Aim 2 will examine whether age-related changes in memory encoding contribute to
reduced sleep-dependent procedural memory consolidation. It is hypothesized that older adults fail to engage
the hippocampus at encoding of such tasks, a necessary state for sleep-dependent memory consolidation to
occur. However, additional training is hypothesized to yield sleep-dependent performance benefits in older
adults. The proposed research is innovative as it applies a novel concept to the field of cognitive aging, refines
the approach to studies of sleep-dependent memory consolidation (accounting for encoding capacity), utilizes
novel techniques for this field (high-depensity polysomnography, fMRI), and seeks to shift the treatment and
preventive strategies for Alzheimer’s disease and aging to sleep targets. Moreover, the proposed work is
significant as it will inform approaches to Alzheimer’s disease prevention and treatment: if individual
differences in memory encoding or sleep microstructure reduce sleep-dependent memory processing, these
may be targets for delaying onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms and other forms of cognitive decline.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9884697
- **Project number:** 5R01AG040133-08
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
- **Principal Investigator:** Rebecca M C Spencer
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $545,621
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-07-15 → 2023-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9884697

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9884697, What is sleep's role in Alzheimer's disease? Insight from healthy aging (5R01AG040133-08). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9884697. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*