Optimising sleep to slow dementia progression and improve quality of life

Summary

People with dementia tell us that poor sleep is a serious problem. Recently, it has become clear that poor sleep may cause or worsen the brain diseases that lead to dementia. We believe that having better sleep may delay, or slow dementia.

Medicines and lifestyle changes could improve sleep. Before designing a clinical trial to test them, we first need to find out the following:

• How well people with dementia sleep and how best to measure sleep. We can then check who needs help and whether the help has worked.
• What can be done straight away to make sure doctors give patients the best possible advice to help sleep.
• Whether people would want to try tablets or lifestyle changes to help sleep and what they would consider acceptable.
• As people with dementia attend several different clinics and hospitals we need to ensure that all patients are aware of research opportunities wherever they are looked after.

In this work, we will measure how often people in memory clinics report sleep difficulty. We will find out if wearable watch-like devices can measure sleep in people who have memory problems. We will carry out a detailed review of research that has already been done and work with patients to understand what research can tell us and what peoples' experiences reveal.

We will draw together people affected by dementia with professionals to check that everyone is happy that our future research is sensible, relevant and useful to people with or at risk of dementia.