Currently, there is no defence exists against Alzheimer’s disease. Don’t despair. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, offers hope.
Scientists at the university have found a way to estimate, with some degree of accuracy, a time frame for when Alzheimer’s is most likely to strike in a person’s lifetime.
Their findings have been published in the journal Current Biology.
The researchers have found that the sleep you are having right now can accurately predict when Alzheimer’s pathology will develop in your brain. It can also tell the speed of the onset of this most virulent form of dementia.
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“The silver lining here is that there’s something we can do about it,” said Walker, a UC Berkeley professor of psychology and neuroscience and senior author of the paper. “The brain washes itself during deep sleep, and so there may be the chance to turn back the clock by getting more sleep earlier in life.”
Beta-amyloid plays the most important role in in the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s. Key brain functions including memory pathways are destroyed by this toxic plaque.
Currently, more than 40 million people worldwide suffer from Alzheimer’s.
Non-rapid eye movement sleep: NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep is dreamless sleep. During NREM, the brain waves on the electroencephalographic (EEG) recording are typically slow and of high voltage, the breathing and heart rate are slow and regular, the blood pressure is low, and the sleeper is relatively still. NREM sleep is divided into 4 stages of increasing depth leading to REM sleep.
The researchers found all participants healthy and active throught the study perod. However, what differentiated the one from another was the beta-amyloid growth. The pattern of this growth was found to be detemined by the baseline sleep quality.
The researchers were able to forecast the increase in beta-amyloid plaques, which are thought to mark the beginning of Alzheimer’s.
“Rather than waiting for someone to develop dementia many years down the road, we are able to assess how sleep quality predicts changes in beta-amyloid plaques across multiple timepoints. In doing so, we can measure how quickly this toxic protein accumulates in the brain over time, which can indicate the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease,” said Winer
