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Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition
A Journal on Normal and Dysfunctional Development
Volume 26, 2019 - Issue 4
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Articles

Sleep disruption explains age-related prospective memory deficits: implications for cognitive aging and intervention

ORCID Icon, , , , , , , , , , & show all
Pages 621-636 | Received 12 Feb 2018, Accepted 13 Aug 2018, Published online: 30 Aug 2018
 

ABSTRACT

The high prevalence of sleep disruption among older adults may have implications for cognitive aging, particularly for higher-order aspects of cognition. One domain where sleep disruption may contribute to age-related deficits is prospective memory—the ability to remember to perform deferred actions at the appropriate time in the future. Community-dwelling older adults (55–93 years, N = 133) undertook assessment of sleep using actigraphy and participated in a laboratory-based prospective memory task. After controlling for education, sleep disruption (longer awakenings) was associated with poorer prospective memory. Additionally, longer awakenings mediated the relationship between older age and poorer prospective memory. Other metrics of sleep disruption, including sleep efficiency and wake after sleep onset, were not related to prospective memory, suggesting that examining the features of individual wake episodes rather than total wake time may help clarify relationships between sleep and cognition. The mediating role of awakening length was partially a function of greater depression and poorer executive function (shifting) but not retrospective memory. This study is among the first to examine the association between objectively measured sleep and prospective memory in older adults. Furthermore, this study is novel in suggesting sleep disruption might contribute to age-related prospective memory deficits; perhaps, with implications for cognitive aging more broadly. Our results suggest that there may be opportunities to prevent prospective memory decline by treating sleep problems.

Acknowledgement

We thank the participants of the Western Australian Memory Study and the Healthy Aging Research Program and Mrs Manja Laws for data collection for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary Material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

The Western Australian Memory Study—from which participants for this work were drawn—was supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia [Grant Number: 324100 awarded to R.M.]; the Australian Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, Inc.; and the McCusker Charitable Foundation.

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