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Getting adequate nighttime sleep could prevent Alzheimer’s disease, being very sleepy during the day leads to deposit of beta amyloid in the brain, beta amyloid is a protein that causes Alzheimer’s disease. Daytime sleep could encourage this form of dementia to develop. Healthy diet, regular exercise and cognitive activity can prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
The study used data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), a long-term study started by the NIA in 1958 that followed the health of thousands of volunteers as they age. As part of the study’s periodic exams, volunteers filled a questionnaire between 1991 and 2000 that asked a simple yes/no question: “Do you often become drowsy or fall asleep during the daytime when you wish to be awake?” They were also asked, “Do you nap?” with response options of “daily,” “1-2 times/week,” “3-5 times/week,” and “rarely or never.”
A subgroup of BLSA volunteers also began receiving neuroimaging assessments in 1994. Starting in 2005, some of these participants received positron emission tomography (PET) scans using Pittsburgh compound B (PiB), a radioactive compound that can help identify beta-amyloid plaques in neuronal tissue. These plaques are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
The researchers identified 123 volunteers who both answered the earlier questions and had a PET scan with PiB an average of nearly 16 years later. They then analyzed this data to see if there was a correlation between participants who reported daytime sleepiness or napping and whether they scored positive for beta-amyloid deposition in their brains.
Before adjusting for demographic factors that could influence daytime sleepiness, such as age, sex, education, and body-mass index, their results showed that those who reported daytime sleepiness were about three times more likely to have beta-amyloid deposition than those who didn’t report daytime fatigue. After adjusting for these factors, the risk was still 2.75 times higher in those with daytime sleepiness.
The unadjusted risk for amyloid-beta deposition was about twice as high in volunteers who reported napping, but this did not reach statistical significance. Animal studies in Alzheimer’s disease models have shown that restricting nighttime sleep can lead to more beta-amyloid protein in the brain and spinal fluid. Human studies have linked poor sleep with greater measures of beta-amyloid in neuronal tissues. Adults should prevent nighttime sleep disturbance to prevents Alzheimer’s disease.