Researchers at the University of Kentucky's Sanders-Brown Center on Aging have discovered that the chronic sleep loss plaguing Alzheimer's patients is caused by the brain's own overactive immune cells, not by the amyloid plaques those cells are responding to, and that silencing these immune cells restored more than two hours of restorative sleep per night in an animal model without clearing a single plaque from the brain.
The study, led by Shannon L. Macauley, Ph.D., an associate professor of physiology at the UK College of Medicine, and first author Nicholas J. Constantino, was published in Alzheimer's & Dementia with a university press release issued July 16, 2026, and wider media coverage beginning July 20.
