Alzheimer's disease and sleep
Scientists have found a link between daytime sleep and the development of Alzheimer's disease
Olga Ivanova, Naked Science
Older people are known to like to take a nap during the day. But this fact is often ignored by doctors and scientists: little is known about the longitudinal relationship between daytime sleep and cognitive aging. Although the effect of daytime sleep on the abilities and skills of older people has been studied, the results of such studies are contradictory. Some show that daytime sleep helps cognitive activity, and also improves mood and gives cheerfulness, others — that such a habit, on the contrary, has adverse consequences for intelligence.
The authors of a new paper published in Alzheimer's & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer's Association (Li et al., Daytime napping and Alzheimer's dementia: A potential bidirectional relationship), showed the shortcomings of past studies. For example, that they all evaluated the participant's sleep based on subjective data based on a questionnaire. A team of scientists from Harvard Medical School, the Universities of California and Rush (USA) decided to conduct a more objective analysis.
They examined the data of 1401 participants (average age — 81 years) of the Rush Memory and Aging project. The volunteers wore a special device on their wrist that helped determine the exact duration of their sleep. It turned out that this characteristic, as well as the frequency of sleep, positively correlate with age. In addition, researchers have identified a bidirectional longitudinal relationship between daytime sleep and dementia.
That is, longer and more frequent daytime sleep turned out to be a risk factor for the development of Alzheimer's disease in normal elderly people — both men and women. In addition, the researchers found that the annual increase in the duration and frequency of daytime sleep accelerated as the disease progressed, especially after the clinical manifestation of dementia.
It turns out a vicious circle: the more an elderly person sleeps during the day, the higher his risk of "earning" Alzheimer's disease, and the faster the disease develops, the more often and longer the daytime sleep.
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