Florida State University expert available to discuss research related to Alzheimer’s disease

June is Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month — a time to reflect on the importance of brain health and understand the risk factors involved with progressive diseases like Alzheimer’s disease.

According to the Alzheimer’s Association, more than 7 million Americans are living with the disease. By 2050, this number is projected to rise to nearly 13 million. It is characterized by the buildup of abnormal protein deposits in the brain that can eventually cause increased difficulty with memory, thinking and daily activities.

Florida State University’s Aaron Wilber, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, is an expert on sleep-related brain function as it relates to Alzheimer’s disease. Part of his focus is understanding the relationship between sleep and the removal of protein aggregates related to the disease.

One of the mechanisms studied at the Wilber Lab is the glymphatic system, which may wash away debris such as protein aggregates while we sleep. The Wilber Lab, located in FSU’s psychology department, is performing research that helps to understand how humans get oriented in space so they can navigate their environment and understand what goes wrong when this system fails.

By studying the effect of sleep as it relates to Alzheimer’s disease, Wilber is tackling an area of research that is starting to gain notoriety.

“Sleep is starting to get the attention that it deserves,” Wilber said. “The National Institutes of Health has identified this as a key area of research related to Alzheimer’s disease. Memory-related brain activity patterns during sleep are still receiving very little attention. In 2014, I was one of the first, if not the first, to start studying this in rodents. There are now a few other labs that have started to pick up this area of research that I think needs more attention.”

Media inquiries on Wilber’s research and expertise of Alzheimer’s disease may contact him at wilber@psy.fsu.edu.

Aaron Wilber, associate professor, Florida State University Department of Psychology

 In your current research studying sleep-related brain function in Alzheimer’s disease, what are some of the most notable breakthroughs you’ve found?
“One of the features of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is protein aggregation. One of the earliest problems someone encounters, usually before being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, is getting lost frequently in new surroundings. We looked at mice modeling the protein aggregation seen in human AD that had very little aggregation and had just started to develop subtle impairments related to getting lost in new surroundings. We know that normal people and mice have activity patterns that ‘play back’ when they are sleeping that seem to reflect replaying experiences they had while awake. These replayed patterns play back at high speed, up to 20 times faster than when awake. This high-speed playback seems to be a method your brain uses to build the connections between brain cells that seem to represent our memories.

“In these mice modeling protein aggregation, we examined activity patterns during sleep. We found that these mice had relatively intact patterns of activity within a single brain region but that the cross-brain region synchronization of these events was impaired. In normal mice, the strength of cross region coupling predicted learning and memory the next day, but in mice with protein aggregation this relationship had broken down. Different parts of memories are thought to be stored in different brain regions. For example, remembering the sight, taste, smell and place where you had breakfast today might involve binding together this information from a number of brain regions. Therefore, our data suggests that one of the earliest changes in terms of memory in people that will develop Alzheimer’s disease may not be memory for individual elements, but the binding together of the aspects of a memory to build a cohesive representation of that experience.”

The concept of a good night’s sleep appears to have more positive health effects than previously realized several years ago. Has your research linked disruptive sleep patterns to future cognitive impairment that could possibly lead to Alzheimer’s disease?
“Our second Alzheimer’s disease area of research is more focused on sleep. This is exactly what we are trying to do now — link subtle disturbances in sleep to future cognitive impairments, but we are not quite there yet. We have identified what appears to be a very subtle marker of dysfunctional sleep that appears at a similar timepoint to my above description, when subtle cognitive changes have just barely started to appear. We have observed this change in three different rodents modeling aspects of human AD (rats and mice) and can identify it with just two hours of sleep or 24 hours of sleep recordings. Another lab also identified the same marker in a different (4th) rodent model of AD. There is evidence it is also present in humans that will develop AD. This sleep marker essentially suggests that sleep is ‘too shallow’ at this early stage.”

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