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People Who Nap Each Day Have A Higher Risk Of Having Alzheimer's Disease

People Who Nap Each Day Have A Higher Risk Of Having Alzheimer's Disease

Good sleep promotes good health and daily well-being but few people get to sleep well at night. Certainly, the nap can be beneficial to reinvigorate, but provided that it is not excessive. Indeed, researchers report that people who take too much naps, could develop Alzheimer's disease. Relayed by our colleagues from the Daily Mail, this study explains the impact of daytime sleepiness on the onset of neurological disorders.

What is Alzheimer's disease?

Alzheimer's disease is a neurological disorder that causes the destruction of brain cells. The result is a decline in thinking, behavior and memory.

The symptoms of the disease are as follows:

The loss of memory is an early sign, resulting in difficulty remembering recent discussions or events, which becomes persistent and worsens over time. So questions can be repeated, objects can be moved to unusual places, names of family members are forgotten or words are forgotten to express a thought.

The difficulty of thinking and reasoning and concentrating on numbers, as well as the difficulty of dealing with everyday tasks, such as paying bills or filling out checks.

Inability to make decisions and make judgments or to make clothing or cooking choices.

The change of personality and mood and which can be translated among others, by depression, mistrust vis-à-vis others, wandering, delusions or irritability and aggression.

Risk factors
According to the FRM Medical Research Foundation, the risk factors for Alzheimer's disease are:
  • The increasing age which is a first risk factor of this disease and which affects the subjects from 60 years old.
  • The genetics that play a role in the occurrence of the disease even if rare hereditary cases have been diagnosed.
  • Cardiovascular risk and why it is important to monitor, among others, hypertension, lipid disorders, diabetes overweight and lack of sleep.

New study suggests daytime sleepiness is a risk of dementia
The cause of dementia is not really known but a new study has a whole new suggestion. Thus, according to research published in JAMA Neurology, older people who suffer from excessive daytime sleepiness are more likely to accumulate beta-amyloid protein. This Tau protein forms entanglements in the brain, opening the way to a risk of dementia. To this end, a prospective analysis included participants aged 70 and over without dementia, in order to answer a survey to assess the impact of daytime sleepiness on the risk of a neurological disorder.

This group of participants reported that daytime sleepiness can be an indicator of Alzheimer's disease, especially in people with sleep disorders. Indeed, and according to biological studies, when the brain sleeps, it eradicates the amyloid deposits responsible for the death of nerve cells and a lack of deep sleep nourishes these proteins and destroys the neurons. However, during this study, it has not been demonstrated whether the deposition of amyloid plaques leads to disturbed sleep.

Also, the quality of sleep is to be monitored, especially as sleep decreases in men from 30 years and women from 50 years. And according to Professor Brendan Lucey, Director of the Sleep Medicine Center at Washington University in St. Louis, the most important thing is not the total amount of sleep that is linked to the destructive protein, it is slow wave sleep that reflects the quality of sleep. The reduction of slow wave activity could be a marker of the transition between normal and negative states.

Patients who need additional tests can be identified simply by asking them, "How many naps are you doing during the day? ".

Thus, by measuring the sleep of these people we could do an early detection of Alzheimer's disease, before developing memory and thinking problems, which can worsen over time, because the disease begins slowly and silently.

For example, sleep monitoring would be an easy way for researchers to track the disease and allow doctors to take a closer look at what might happen in the brain.
Alzheimer's Disease