2023-11-07 05:12:32
Researchers reveal: Dementia risk has to do with sleep
07.11.2023, 06:12 | Reading time: 2 minutes
In order to reduce the risk of dementia, older people in particular should ensure deep sleep.
Photo: Wavebreakmedia / Shutterstock / wavebreakmedia
The quality of sleep influences your health during the day. Australian researchers have found that this also applies to dementia.
Berlin. Regeneration, detoxification, learning: A whole range of processes take place during sleep that are crucial for physical and mental performance. If you don’t sleep enough, you will feel exhausted and tired in everyday life. Ours too Brain and our nervous system can be damaged by too little sleep: According to an Australian study, even a slightly reduced level of deep sleep significantly increases the risk of dementia.
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Researchers warn: Even one percent less deep sleep per year can increase the risk of dementia
The Research team Psychologist Matthew Pase from the Turner Institute at Monash University conducted a long-term study with 346 people over 60 years old. Participants took part in two sleep studies, with the second study taking place an average of five years after the first. The participants were then monitored for dementia symptoms until 2018.
The results showed that a decrease in Deep sleep phases Just one percent per year can increase the risk of later developing dementia by 27 percent. These results remained valid even after adjusting for factors such as age, gender, smoking status and medication use. At the same time, the team pointed out that a reversal of their results is also conceivable, for example by promoting or maintaining “slow-wave sleep” in old age.
What is deep sleep and how does it prevent dementia?
With “Slow-Wave-Sleep“ refers to the third and fourth sleep phases: dreamless deep sleep and the dreamy REM phase. In these sleep phases, all characteristics of the waking state are particularly weak – pulse, breathing rate, muscle tension and sensory perception are reduced to an absolute minimum. The body is maximally relaxed, especially during deep sleep.
According to Matthew Pase from the Turner Institute at Monash University, deep sleep is also said to… memory performance “We know that sleep increases the clearance of metabolic waste from the brain, including the clearance of proteins that build up in Alzheimer’s disease,” writes Pase in the journal JAMA Neurology.
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Alzheimer’s: Genetic predisposition influences deep sleep
The researchers further examined whether the genetic risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease is associated with a decrease in deep sleep and brain volume. Here, too, it was shown that the genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s leads to an accelerated decrease in deep sleep in later life, but not to a decrease in brain volume.
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