Researchers at Washington University's School of Medicine found that middle-aged people who woke frequently in the night had a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's later in life.
Preliminary results of the study, which will be presented at the American Academy of Neurology meet in April, suggested that treating sleep problems might be beneficial for the brain in the long run.
"If sleep is found to affect either the beginning or the progression of Alzheimer's disease, especially in its early stages, then it's really an attractive thing to try to manipulate, because getting more sleep or better sleep has really no risk," study researcher Yo-el Ju, an assistant professor of neurology, was quoted as saying by LiveScience.
Ju and her colleagues recruited 100 volunteers ages 45 to 80, all of whom had been clinically tested and showed no signs of memory loss or cognitive decline.
The volunteers wore a wristwatch-like device called an actigraph for two weeks. The device measures activity levels, which can then be translated into time asleep and time awake.
"Other studies that have looked at the relationship between sleep and dementia have generally studied older individuals who are obviously at higher risk of dementia, so I think this study is important because we're looking at a population that is much younger," Ju said.
The results revealed that people who spent more of their time in bed tossing and turning rather than sleeping were more likely to show abnormal levels of chemicals that indicate amyloid beta -- the primary ingredient in the amyloid plaques that clog the brains of people with Alzheimer's.
These chemical markers show up 10 or 15 years before any sign of memory loss or decline, but almost everyone who has them will eventually develop Alzheimer's if they don't die of something else first. About 25 per cent of the people in the study fell intothis "preclinical Alzheimer's" category.
People who woke up more than average -- or more than five times every hour -- were also more likely to show signs of amyloid beta accumulation. Participants didn't necessarily remember these waking periods the next morning, Ju said.
The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In the meantime, they're continuing the sleep studies on more volunteers. In the long term, Ju said, the researchers hope to find out what causes the troubled sleep in people with preclinical Alzheimer's.
"These are pretty preliminary results, and although they are intriguing and promising, we really need to do longer-term studies to find out which direction this is going," Ju said.
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