Abstract
Sleep disorders, despite being very frequent in adults with Down syndrome (DS), are often overlooked due to a lack of awareness by families and physicians and the absence of specific clinical sleep guidelines. Untreated sleep disorders have a negative impact on physical and mental health, behavior, and cognitive performance. Growing evidence suggests that sleep disruption may also accelerate the progression to symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in this population. It is therefore imperative to have a better understanding of the sleep disorders associated with DS in order to treat them, and in doing so, improve cognition and quality of life, and prevent related comorbidities. This paper reviews the current knowledge of the main sleep disorders in adults with DS, including evaluation and management. It highlights the existing gaps in knowledge and discusses future directions to achieve earlier diagnosis and better treatment of sleep disorders most frequently found in this population.
Highlights
The rates of Behavioral sleep disturbances (BSD) in adults with Down syndrome (DS) estimated in family reports obtained from clinical interviews and online community-based surveys ranged from 22.75% to 48% [2,5], whereas BSD rates of up to 75% were reported based on objective sleep measures and well-defined sleep criteria [14,24]
In adults with DS, the only published study that compared sleep quality between subjective and objective measures lacked the sensitivity of subjective sleep measures to detect sleep disorders found in 74% of polysomnography tests [1]
Sleep disorders are very frequent in the DS population, with a higher prevalence of obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia than in the general population
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Sleep disorders have a negative impact on general health and mental, behavioral, and cognitive functions, especially in older individuals [10]. They can contribute to decreased autonomy, more social isolation, and family burden [5]. Most adults with evidenceDS suggests that sleep disturbances can accelerate the progression to AD dementia, are at ultra-high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease due to the extra copy of and AD the canamyloid aggravate sleep problems a feed-forward loop [13]. Growing evidence treatment of sleep in DS are the essential to prevent additionaland AD suggests that disorders sleep disturbances can accelerate progression to AD dementia, consequences comorbidities.
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