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AAN 2026 | Sleep disorders and cognition: early markers of neurodegeneration and clinical implications
Parichita Choudhury, MD, Banner Health, Phoenix, AZ, discusses the relationship between sleep disorders and cognitive function, highlighting conditions such as obstructive sleep apnea, REM sleep behavior disorder, and insomnia. She emphasizes their potential role as early indicators of neurodegenerative disease and the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to diagnosis and management in clinical practice. This interview took place at the 78th American Academy of Neurology (AAN) Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL.
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Transcript
The idea about the session is to think about how important sleep is in our cognitive functioning and how sleep changes over age due to normal physiology alone, but how different sleep conditions, such as obstructive sleep apnea, as well as REM sleep behavior disorder where people act out their dreams are harbingers of neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive impairment in the future and some of it is emerging evidence while others are well established and we’re going to use a case-based session where we are going to progress through different cases and kind of talk about what are our approaches to diagnosis as well as treatment for the general neurologist...
The idea about the session is to think about how important sleep is in our cognitive functioning and how sleep changes over age due to normal physiology alone, but how different sleep conditions, such as obstructive sleep apnea, as well as REM sleep behavior disorder where people act out their dreams are harbingers of neurodegenerative diseases and cognitive impairment in the future and some of it is emerging evidence while others are well established and we’re going to use a case-based session where we are going to progress through different cases and kind of talk about what are our approaches to diagnosis as well as treatment for the general neurologist. When do we test for certain sleep conditions? Does a negative test rule out a condition? If we do find something like mild obstructive sleep apnea, should we be treating it if someone’s having memory problems? And if people cannot tolerate face masks, what are our alternatives? The other thing we’re going to emphasize is insomnia, which seems to be a very common problem in the general population, but particularly in people who either have cognitive impairment or even as they have progressed into dementia stages, they frequently have insomnia. And we don’t necessarily have great guidance on what are the appropriate approaches in helping these patients, whether they are non-pharmacological or pharmacological or device-related. So we’re going to have a deep discussion between sleep neurologists and cognitive neurologists. And the other thing that will come out hopefully during the session is what is the perspective of a cognitive neurologist when they’re seeing a patient who has memory problems in their clinic and may also have some sleep issues versus the perspective of the sleep neurologist who’s seeing the same patient with the diagnosis of sleep apnea also complaining about memory problems and how the two different perspectives kind of can come together hopefully in a multidisciplinary approach to help our patients.
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Disclosures
The institution of Dr. Choudhury has received research support from Lewy Body Dementia Association. The institution of Dr. Choudhury has received research support from Arizona Alzheimer’s Consortium.
