A Central Role of Sulcal Width in the Associations of Sleep Duration and Depression with Cognition in Mid to Late Life

Evidence suggests that poor sleep impacts on cognition, brain health and dementia risk but the nature of the association is poorly understood. This study examined how self-reported sleep duration, napping, and subjective depression symptoms are associated to the brain-cognition relationship in older adults, using sulcal width as a measure of relative brain health. A canonical Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis was used to obtain two composite variables that relate cognition and sulcal width in a cross-sectional study of 137 adults aged 46-72. We used a combination of ANCOVA and path analyses to test the associations of self-reported sleep duration, napping, and subjective depression symptoms with the brain-cognition relationship. We observed a significant main effect of sleep duration on sulcal width, with participants reporting 7 hours showing narrower sulci than other durations. This effect remained significant after including subjective depression as a covariate, which also had a significant main effect on sulcal width in the model. There was no significant effect of napping on sulcal width. In path analyses where the effects of age, self-reported sleep duration and depression symptoms were investigated together, sulcal width mediated the relationship between age and cognition. We also observed a significant indirect effect of sulci width in the subjective depression-cognition relationship. Findings suggest that self-reported sleep duration and subjective depression may each be independently associated with brain morphology, which is related to cognitive functions. Results could help inform clinical trials and related intervention studies that aim at delaying cognitive decline in adults at risk of developing dementia.