United States: A new study shows that getting more deep sleep could help protect our brains from problems like Alzheimer’s disease, which affects memory. Researchers studied 62 older adults who were healthy and found that those who got more deep sleep had better memory, even if they had brain changes linked to Alzheimer’s. The study was done by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, and UC Irvine.
This was irrespective of education and physical activity two known protective factors for cognitive function in old age besides social connectedness.
In those with similar Alzheimer’s-related alterations that didn’t experience as much deep sleep, their scores on similar tests were slightly worse. On the other hand, the variables did not show significant changes as a result of sleep among people with little deposits.
As reported by the Science alert, taken together, the results published in May last year suggest stockpiling a good amount of solid sack time could help in some small way to counterbalance the progressive deterioration in memory that occurs when dementia is starting to weigh in.
As University of California (UC) Berkeley neuroscientist Matthew Walker said: “It appears that memory is likened to a life raft to which deep sleep is akin to prevention from being dragged down by the weight of Alzheimer’s disease pathology.”
This is especially exciting because here it is possible to do something about it. It is therefore possible to say that we can enhance sleep, even in the older persons.
This is not the first time that research has revealed that there is aggregated formation of amyloid-beta proteins in the brains of people with a poor sleep pattern.
However, people with Alzheimer’s disease also sleep poorly, which means that often we cannot distinct between cause and consequence. Similarly, agglutinated amyloid-beta proteins could be an impotent biomarker of Alzheimer’s only and not the intermediate upon which the illness is based.
However, the extents of amyloid-beta proteins are widely used to indicate the presence of Alzheimer’s disease due to the fact that the above research indicates that these – together with another protein known as tau — may begin accumulating within neurons as much as 20 to 30 years prior to the first signs of the disease.
Previous work from Walker’s group established that amyloid-beta, a protein implicated in Alzheimer’s, can accumulate in the brains of older adults to interfere with deep sleep – non-rapid eye movement slow wave sleep – and memory.