Project description
A closer look at sleep’s role in Alzheimer’s early detection
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) poses a growing public health crisis, particularly within our aging population. Emerging research highlights sleep as a critical factor in slowing AD’s progression, particularly concerning the accumulation of amyloid-beta and tau proteins, as well as neurodegeneration. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the ADEEPSLEEP project aims to explore this connection, focusing on the brain regions that regulate sleep, which are among the first affected by AD. This innovative project uses advanced neuroimaging techniques to study how disruptions in sleep-wake cycles contribute to AD’s early stages. The findings could pave the way for earlier detection and intervention, offering hope in the fight against this devastating disease.
Objective
The increased prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in our ageing society constitutes an urgent, far-reaching public health concern. In the worldwide effort to identify leverage points to prevent or delay the onset of AD, sleep has recently emerged as a potent modifiable factor to slow down the hallmark pathophysiological processes of the disease, namely amyloid-beta and tau protein accumulation together with neurodegeneration. Crucially, the brain regions that regulate sleep and wakefulness are the first to be affected by AD pathology in the preclinical stages of the disease, but their role in the link between sleep-wake disruption and AD pathogenesis has so far been critically overlooked, due to the inherent difficulty to image them in vivo in humans. In this project, I will take an innovative approach, by using state-of-the-art multimodal neuroimaging methods to investigate the contribution of these brain regions to sleep-wake quality in the earliest stages of the disease, and ultimately to AD-related trajectories. The underlying hypothesis is that worse structural and functional integrity of key sleep-wake nuclei will be associated with poorer sleep-wake phenotypes in the context of AD pathology, and will in turn hasten clinical symptomatology. The unmatched scientific expertise and resources provided by the team of Prof. Johnson at Massachusetts General Hospital will constitute an outstanding multidisciplinary environment to further develop my knowledge in advanced neuroimaging techniques and statistical modeling approaches, and to bolster my multifaceted international research network. The wide range of scientific and management skills acquired throughout this fellowship, combined with the international exposure and the resulting close collaborations between European and American research groups, will be key for my future career in Europe as an independent researcher contributing to the global endeavour to improve the earliest detection and prevention of AD.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesneurobiology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineneurologydementiaalzheimer
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesbiochemistrybiomoleculesproteins
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepathology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-GF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - Global FellowshipsCoordinator
6200 MD Maastricht
Netherlands