We examined whether the Neurological Institute of Athens (NIA) Sleep-Mediated Neuropsychological Battery (SM-NP) can predict neurodegenerative brain burden.

We recruited 45 older patients with either cognitive or sleep disorders and non-impaired controls (Age 66.5 ± 9.9; F:M 24:21) through the Sleep & Memory Center at the NIA as part of the MES-CoBraD Horizon2020 project. Participants underwent structured clinical examinations, within-day neuropsychological testing, actigraphy, polysomnography, pre- and post-sleep plasma analyses (p-tau217, total Tau, Aβ40, Aβ42, GFAP, NFL, insulin, cortisol), and the 12-minute-long SM-NP containing a 9-item learning task and a phonemic fluency task. We explored associations between pre- and post-sleep plasma biomarkers and SM-NP metrics through parametric correlations and partial correlations, and applied 5-fold linear discriminant analysis using SM-NP metrics to classify people into high vs. low likelihood of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) pathology using p-tau217 as the gold standard (<0.4 or >0.63 pg/mL). Multiple comparisons were addressed with Holm–Bonferroni correction.

The SM-NP is easy-to-administer and fast and is both correlated to and accurate in predicting neurodegeneration-associated plasma biomarkers. Furthermore, timing of blood collection modifies the sensitivity and specificity of plasma p-tau217.