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SLEEP 2026 | Diagnosing and managing sleep disorders in neurodegenerative disease
Brienne Miner, MD, MHS, Yale School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, discusses the challenges of diagnosing and managing sleep disorders in people with neurodegenerative diseases. She highlights the importance of obtaining collateral history from family members and caregivers, as well as taking a comprehensive approach to identify multiple factors that may be affecting sleep. This interview took place at the 40th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) in Baltimore, MD.
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Transcript
So I practice as a sleep medicine physician, mostly in a dementia clinic, and so I think one of the major challenges there is actually getting good information about whether there is a sleep problem in the first place. It’s often the case that patients may not be able to provide a history for us. So I think my key recommendation there is to really get good collateral information from family members or other people who might be in the home and can give you a more specific idea of what is going on with people’s sleep...
So I practice as a sleep medicine physician, mostly in a dementia clinic, and so I think one of the major challenges there is actually getting good information about whether there is a sleep problem in the first place. It’s often the case that patients may not be able to provide a history for us. So I think my key recommendation there is to really get good collateral information from family members or other people who might be in the home and can give you a more specific idea of what is going on with people’s sleep. So another unique challenge when you take care of older people is that as we age, we collect conditions. So it’s usually the case that there could be multiple things going on at the same time that are affecting somebody’s sleep. So I think the recommendation there is to remember to do a really global evaluation of sleep, not to just focus on one sleep problem and treat that and think we’re done. So, for example, somebody may have sleep apnea and you may treat that, but they may have other things going on. They may have a medication that’s impacting their sleep. They may have another sleep disorder, right? They may have a circadian disorder. So I think we need to remember that usually older adults can have multiple things going on at the same time that are contributing to their sleep problems.
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