Understanding the relationship between sleep quality and cognitive function in older adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does the quality of nightly sleep influence cognitive abilities as individuals advance through the later decades of life, and what sleep parameters demonstrate the strongest relationships with specific cognitive domains? This cross-sectional research examined the relationship between sleep quality parameters and cognitive function among community-dwelling older adults aged 65 years and above residing in the Copenhagen metropolitan area of Denmark. Participants were recruited from primary care practices and senior community centers between February 2019 and November 2020, with 523 individuals completing comprehensive sleep and cognitive assessments at the Danish Center for Sleep Medicine at Rigshospitalet. Sleep quality was evaluated using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index measuring subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, sleep duration, habitual sleep efficiency, sleep disturbances, use of sleep medication, and daytime dysfunction over the preceding month. Cognitive function was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment examining attention, executive function, memory, language, visuospatial abilities, and orientation domains representing the full spectrum of cognitive abilities. Results revealed that 47.2% of participants demonstrated poor sleep quality defined by Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index scores exceeding five points, with poor sleepers showing significantly lower cognitive scores compared to good sleepers across all measured domains. Multiple regression analysis controlling for age, education, depression, and medical comorbidities demonstrated that sleep quality independently predicted cognitive performance, with each one-point increase in Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index associated with 0.34-point decrease in Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores. Sleep efficiency emerged as the strongest individual predictor of cognitive function among the seven sleep parameters examined, followed by sleep duration and daytime dysfunction severity. Domain-specific analyses revealed particularly strong associations between poor sleep and executive function deficits, with weaker but still significant relationships observed for memory and processing speed outcomes. Participants meeting screening criteria for mild cognitive impairment demonstrated substantially worse sleep quality profiles compared to cognitively normal individuals, suggesting bidirectional relationships between sleep disturbance and cognitive decline in aging populations requiring further longitudinal investigation. These findings underscore the importance of sleep quality assessment and intervention in geriatric clinical practice as a potentially modifiable risk factor for cognitive decline among older adults. Healthcare providers should routinely screen older patients for sleep disturbances and consider sleep optimization as a component of comprehensive cognitive health promotion strategies targeting the aging Danish population.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".