For quite a long time, researches on
Alzheimer's disease (AD) primarily focused on the cortex and hippocampus, while the cerebellum has been ignored because of its abnormalities considered to appear in the late stage of AD. In recent years, increasing evidence suggest that the cerebellar pathological changes possibly occur in the preclinical phase of AD, which is also associated with
sleep disorder. Sleep disturbance is a high risk factor of AD. However, the changes and roles of cerebellum has rarely been reported under conditions of AD accompanied with
sleep disorders. In this study, using an
amyloid-β oligomers (AβO)-induced rat model of AD subjected to
sleep deprivation, combining with
a 7.0 T animals structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we assessed structural changes of cerebellum in MRI. Our results showed that
sleep deprivation combined with AβO led to an increased FA value in the anterior lobe of cerebellum, decreased ADC value in the cerebellar lobes and cerebellar nuclei, and increased cerebellum volume. Besides that,
sleep deprivation exacerbated the damage of AβO to the cerebellar structural network. This study demonstrated that
sleep deprivation could aggravate the damage to cerebellum induced by AβO. The present findings provide supporting evidence for the involvement of cerebellum in the early pathology of AD and sleep loss. Our data would contribute to advancing the understanding of the mysterious role of cerebellum in AD and
sleep disorders, as well as would be helpful for developing non-invasive MRI
biomarkers for screening early AD patients with self-reported sleep disturbances.