Recent research has shown the importance of sleep for a variety of health reasons, but new research is showing that lack of sleep or waking up several times during the night may increase your chances of developing Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that creates issues with thinking, behavior and memory. A sticky plaque called beta-amyloid builds up in the spaces between the nerve cells, causing toxicity in the brain. A study in the journal JAMA Neurology has discovered that disrupted sleep can actually increase this plaque in the brain.
Subjects over the age of 70 were studied as part of the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging. Those who reported getting the least amount of sleep (less than five hours per night) and those who reported experiencing waking multiple times during the night were discovered to have more beta-amyloid plaque buildup once imaging scans were performed of their brains. This increased buildup could be a key indicator for Alzheimer’s disease risk.
Sleep studies have also discovered that those with sleep apnea (a sleep disorder that is characterized by pausing in breathing during sleep) have double the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
The good news is that troubled sleep or trouble staying asleep (also known as sleep maintenance insomnia) is treatable, and this new information could be vital in protecting seniors’ brains. The average adult should be getting seven to eight hours of sleep per night. It is well known that troubled sleep causes difficulties in focus and learning the following day, and we are coming to find out this could be related to dying brain cells.
This importance of this work lies in overwhelming amount of expected Alzheimer’s cases to develop in the coming years as the baby boomer generation will be approaching their 70’s. More than 5 million Americans have already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and that number is expected to climb to more than double in the United States by the year 2050, and according to the World Health Organization, more than triple globally, reaching an estimated 115.4 million cases.
