We all have an unsung affair with our beds. And people just won’t allow the two of you to be on your own.
Now, thanks to scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and Stanford University, you no longer have to encounter your mama bear’s wrath on waking up late.
A research paper published on July 10 in the journal Brain, has found that a single nights’ interrupted sleep causes an increase in brain proteins believed to cause Alzheimer’s disease.
This study has found that just one night of sleep disruption led to an increase in a protein called amyloid beta, while a week of sleep disturbance led to increased levels of a protein called tau. Both proteins are connected with Alzheimer’s disease.
“The study shows specifically that slow wave sleep, or deep sleep, is important for lowering the levels of amyloid overnight. We think that not getting good sleep chronically over the years would increase the risk of the amyloid and tau clumping up and causing Alzheimer’s disease.” said Yo-El Ju, a neurologist at the University of Washington at Saint Louis and a co-author of the research.
The
research involved a group of 17 healthy volunteers aged between 35 and 65, who each undertook two sleep experiments a month apart.All the participants wore activity monitors for two weeks before they went to the lab to sleep for a night. The monitors measured the quality of their sleep, according to the report.
Half of the volunteers were randomly selected to have their sleep disrupted for the first night. A month later, the volunteers returned, and the second half of the group had their sleep interrupted this time.
While asleep, all participants wore headphones, but while one group had no noises played to them, the other group were played a series of beeps of increasing loudness when it was detected that they had entered slow-wave sleep. “Our goal was to get them to just get out of slow-wave sleep, but not wake up,” said Ju.
The day after each experiment, study volunteers had a spinal tap so levels of amyloid beta and tau could be measured.
The results, based on data from 17 participants, revealed a 10 percent increase in amyloid beta after a single night of bad sleep. But there was no rise in tau after one bad night. However, those who had slept poorly in the week leading up to the experiment did have an increase in tau levels.
“We were not surprised to find that tau levels didn’t budge after just one night of disrupted sleep while amyloid levels did, because amyloid levels normally change more quickly than tau levels. But we could see, when the participants had several bad nights in a row at home, that their tau levels had risen.” Said Dr. Yo-El Ju.
The authors of the study say that the findings show how repeated disruption of slow wave sleep, or poor quality sleep, could lead to a buildup of beta-amyloid and tau, increasing the risk of plaques and tangles forming in the brain and eventually increasing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease.
While the study size was small, experts say that this research is an exciting step in unpicking the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Many, many Americans are chronically sleep-deprived, and it negatively affects their health in many ways,” Ju said in a press release.
“At this point, we can’t say whether improving sleep will reduce your risk of developing Alzheimer’s. All we can really say is that bad sleep increases levels of some proteins that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease. But a good night’s sleep is something you want to be striving for anyway,” she added.
Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy and wise!
This no longer seems to be just another lame old proverb now, does it?
