Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 16, 2026

Multi-Modal Home Sleep Monitoring in Older Adults
Published on: January 26, 2019
Sleep Quality and Risk of Dementia Among Older Male Veterans
Kristine Yaffe1, Jasmine Nettiksimmons2, Jerome Yesavage3
1Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Department of Neurology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Department of Epidemiology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Department of Biostatistics, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; San Francisco Veteran Affairs Medical Center, San Francisco, CA.
Objective:
To determine whether a diagnosis of sleep disturbance is associated with dementia in older veterans.
Methods:
For this retrospective cohort study, we obtained medical record data from the Department of Veterans Affairs National Patient Care Database for 200,000 randomly selected veterans aged 55 years and older. Prevalent cases of dementia from the baseline period (2000-2003) were excluded, leaving an analytic sample of 179,738 male veterans. Follow-up took place from 2004 to 2011. The primary outcome was all-cause dementia, ascertained using International Classification of Disease, Ninth Revision codes. Sleep disturbance, the primary predictor, was also ascertained using these codes.
Results:
After adjusting for potential confounders, those with sleep disturbance had a 27% increased risk of dementia (hazard ratio: 1.27; 95% confidence interval: 1.20-1.34).
Conclusion:
Sleep disturbance was associated with increased risk of dementia among a large cohort of older, primarily male veterans.
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