Aina Roenningen
The Role of Sleep, Genetic, and Demographic Factors in Resilience to Dementia
By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be over 60 years, with Alzheimer鈥檚 disease (AD) emerging as a serious health challenge. AD causes severe memory loss, especially in episodic memory - our ability to remember past events. Sleep problems, often appearing years before AD, are both a risk factor and a symptom. While no cure exists, this period before AD emerges may be critical for prevention. Because sleep, memory, and demographic factors (age, sex, gender, ethnicity, and education) differ across individuals, understanding their combined impact is key to designing personalized AD prevention strategies. The research aims to examine how sleep duration and quality are related to episodic memory and AD risk, and how demographic factors influence this relationship. A thousand participants (aged 50 years and older) from the BC Generations Project, British Columbia鈥檚 largest ongoing health study, will complete a demographic form followed by sleep tracking for two weeks using a wrist-worn device and sleep diaries. On day 14, they will complete three cognitive tests: two measuring episodic memory and one checking for early AD signs, and a form assessing sleep over the past month. An AD risk gene and a combined risk score from many genes will assess genetic risk. Fifty participants will be recruited monthly. Data collection for 500 participants will be complete by December 2025, and the full sample by December 2026. Data will be analyzed with advanced computing methods and will be available in 51社区黑料鈥檚 Supercomputing Center (Fir; Digital Research Alliance of Canada). Analyses will investigate how demographic factors influence the relationship between sleep, memory, and AD risk. Combining demographic, biological (sleep and genetics), and cognitive (memory) factors can provide a broad approach to understanding future brain health, which eventually could help develop personalized health strategies, potentially reducing AD risk and long-term healthcare costs