‘A Rinsing of the Brain.’ New Research Shows How Sleep Could Ward Off Alzheimer’s Disease
ach of us carts around a 3-lb. universe that orchestrates everything we do: directing our conscious actions of moving, thinking and sensing, while also managing body functions we take for granted, like breathing, keeping our hearts beating and digesting our food. It makes sense that such a bustling world of activity would need rest. Which is what, for decades, doctors thought sleep was all about.
In part that’s because while medical experts have long recommended seven to eight hours of sleep a night–including some time spent in deep, or non-REM, sleep–exactly what our bodies are doing during that time is less clear. Now, thanks to newer technologies for measuring and tracking brain activity, scientists have defined the biological processes that occur during good-quality sleep.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, scientists began studying whether there was any causal relationship between sleep patterns and cognitive-test performance among older people without Alzheimer’s by studying them over longer periods of time. Those studies suggested that people with poor sleep habits tended to perform worse on cognitive tests over time. “That got people thinking about the possibility that sleep could be a risk factor in dementia,” says Spira.
It was a revelation for Alzheimer’s experts. “That showed experimentally for the first time that there was an effect of sleep deprivation on Alzheimer’s disease pathology,” says Spira. “That’s what really flipped everything on its head.” In 2013, to test whether the same effect occurred in people, Spira studied brain scans of 70 healthy adults with an average age of 76.
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