Understanding the interplay of sleep and aging: Methodological challenges

In quest of new avenues to explain, predict, and treat pathophysiological conditions during aging, research on sleep and aging has flourished. Despite the great scientific potential to pinpoint mechanistic pathways between sleep, aging, and pathology, only little attention has been paid to the suitability of analytic procedures applied to study these interrelations. On the basis of electrophysiological sleep and structural brain data of healthy younger and older adults, we identify, illustrate, and resolve methodological core challenges in the study of sleep and aging. We demonstrate potential biases in common analytic approaches when applied to older populations. We argue that uncovering age-dependent alterations in the physiology of sleep requires the development of adjusted and individualized analytic procedures that filter out age-independent inter-individual differences. Age-adapted methodological approaches are thus required to foster the development of valid and reliable biomarkers of age-associated cognitive pathologies.