Sleep quality reveals Parkinson’s risk as early as your twenties
A study conducted by the team of Gilles Vandewalle and Puneet Talwar (GIGA Institute – Sleep and Health Laboratory) reveals that the genetic risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is associated with the intensity and duration of REM sleep in healthy individuals averaging just over 20 years old. This breakthrough helps better define the link between sleep and Parkinson’s disease.
P
arkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder. The number of people with PD worldwide has risen from 2.5 million in the 1990s to 8.5 million today, a trend expected to continue in the coming decades. It remains difficult to diagnose before the onset of motor symptoms, which often appear late. “The big challenge is detecting the disease very early, before the damage becomes irreversible,” explains Gilles Vandewalle. Currently, PD is still a clinical diagnosis, as no laboratory biomarker or neuroimaging tool can definitively confirm the disease. Existing pharmacological treatments mainly address motor symptoms without halting the underlying neurodegenerative processes, which are already advanced by the time motor symptoms appear.
It is known that sleep, particularly REM sleep, is altered from the earliest stages of Parkinson’s disease. It could therefore not only serve as an early way to assess the risk of developing PD but also offer new intervention targets (since sleep can be modified). However, we do not yet know exactly when and how this link between sleep and PD emerges in healthy individuals.
Researchers at ULiège leveraged the partially genetic nature of PD to calculate polygenic risk in more than 500 healthy individuals. The sample included mostly young adults (ages 18–31) as well as older participants (ages 50–69). This genetic risk remains very low and cannot predict who will develop the disease. However, its variability is significant because it reflects biological mechanisms related to the disease. The team therefore sought to establish links between this polygenic risk and the sleep characteristics of the participants.
The study’s results show that the genetic risk of developing PD is linked to the intensity of theta waves and the duration of REM sleep. In other words, more theta waves and longer REM sleep appear to indicate a higher risk—two to four decades before the usual age of onset for motor symptoms. Among older participants, the trend reverses: more theta waves and longer REM sleep are now associated with a lower risk. “We believe this reversal could be explained by an overall poorer brain state at that age, even in individuals considered healthy,” notes Puneet Talwar.
These findings suggest that monitoring sleep changes could become a key tool for early identification of at-risk individuals and for guiding targeted prevention strategies, particularly by acting on sleep. This approach is all the more realistic given that sleep can now be measured relatively easily at home and that effective methods exist to improve its quality.
Reference
Puneet Talwar1*, N. Mortazavi1, Ekaterina Koshmanova1, Vincenzo Muto1, Aurora Gasparello1, Christian Degueldre1, Christian Berthomier2, Fabienne Collette1, Christine Bastin1, Christophe Phillips1, Pierre Maquet1,3, Zubkov Mikhail1, Gilles Vandewalle1*
GIGA-CRC-Human Imaging, University of Liège, Liège, 4000 Belgium
Ann Neurol. 2025 Dec 25. doi: 10.1002/ana.78112.
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An article written by Aurélie Gouverneur
