Esther Blessing
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
As people age, their sleep often gets worse and their body temperature tends to drop. Both changes may help drive Alzheimer's disease (AD), a brain disease marked by sticky amyloid plaques and tangles of a protein called tau.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Physiology
- Topics
Alzheimer's disease
Down syndrome
tau
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Verify that lower waking body temperature, measured with an ingestible telemetric thermometer, predicts tau tangles on [18F]-MK-6240 PET in 100 older adults who are cognitively normal or have mild cognitive impairment.
- Account for amyloid plaque load, measured by PiB PET, and for age when modeling how body temperature relates to tau tangles in older adults.
- Test how sleep, measured by two nights of polysomnography including slow-wave sleep, contributes to the relationship between body temperature and tau tangles.
- Test whether more severe obstructive sleep apnea, measured by the apnea-hypopnea index, is associated with worse amyloid, tau and neurodegeneration biomarkers in cognitively stable adults with Down syndrome.
- Determine whether baseline OSA severity and lower body temperature predict faster change in PET, MRI and blood Alzheimer's biomarkers and cognitive decline in adults with Down syndrome over 2 years.
More about the research
Unlike most AD risk factors, sleep and body temperature might be changed with treatment. The two projects described here test whether poor sleep and lower body temperature in humans predict more Alzheimer's-related brain changes. One project studies typical older adults and the other studies adults with Down syndrome.
Why it matters
Sleep apnea and low body temperature may be treatable. If they are shown to speed up Alzheimer's brain changes, they could become targets for interventions that delay the disease. Such interventions could help older adults, and especially people with Down syndrome, for whom Alzheimer's is now the leading cause of death. The studies are meant to lay the groundwork for future temperature- and sleep-based prevention trials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Girardin Jean-Louis
University of Miami, FL·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test in a randomized trial of 330 newly diagnosed older Black adults whether personalized web-based video messaging and coaching (PRAISE) increases adherence to positive airway pressure treatment for obstructive sleep apnea.
Kuang Gong
University of Florida, FL·Biomedical Engineering
Develop a data-driven respiratory motion-correction framework with phase-matched attenuation correction to reduce breathing blur in Gallium-68 PET scans of tumors.
Elwali Ahmed
Marian University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Refine the wakefulness breathing-sound screening algorithm by reducing the influence of body measurements on classification and adding within-person variability, combining deterministic and non-deterministic machine learning models.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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