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July 17th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda MONDAY, July 16 (HealthDay News) — Evidence is building that
poor sleep patterns may do more than make you cranky: The amount and
quality of shuteye you get could be linked to mental deterioration and
Alzheimer’s disease, four new studies suggest.
Too little or too much sleep was equated with two years’ brain aging in
one study. A separate study concluded that people with sleep apnea —
disrupted breathing during sleep — were more than twice as likely to
develop mild thinking problems or dementia compared to problem-free
sleepers. Yet another suggests excessive daytime sleepiness may predict
diminished memory and thinking skills, known as cognitive decline, in
older people.
“Whether sleep changes, such as sleep apnea or disturbances, are signs
of a decline to come or the cause of decline is something we don’t know,
but these four studies . . . shed further light that this is an area we
need to look into more,” said Heather Snyder, senior associate director of
medical and scientific relations for the Alzheimer’s Association in
Chicago, who was not involved in the studies.
The studies are scheduled for presentation Monday at the Alzheimer’s
Association annual meeting in Vancouver.
The largest of the studies, which examined data on more than 15,000
women in the U.S. Nurses’ Health Study, suggested that those who slept
five hours a day or less, or nine hours a day or more, had lower average
mental functioning than participants who slept seven hours per day. Too
much or too little sleep was cognitively equivalent to aging by two years,
according to the research, which followed the women over 14 years
beginning in middle age.
The study also observed that women whose sleep duration changed by two
hours or more a day from mid- to later life had worse brain function than
participants with no change in sleep duration — a finding that held true
regardless of how long they usually slept at the beginning of the
study.
“We went in with the hypothesis that extreme changes in sleep duration
might be worse for cognitive function because they disrupt the circadian
rhythm, so these results line up nicely,” said study author Elizabeth
Devore, an associate epidemiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in
Boston. “I think this gives us data to think about sleep- and
circadian-based interventions being a route to address cognitive
function.” Circadian rhythm is the term for the physical, mental and
behavioral changes that follow a 24-hour cycle.
The other new research that associates sleep and brain function
follows:
- Scientists from University of California, San Francisco measured the
sleep quality of more than 1,300 women over age 75 using sensor units and
recordings of physical changes during sleep. They found that participants
with sleep-disordered breathing or sleep apnea had more than twice the
odds of developing mild cognitive impairment or dementia over five years
than those without those conditions. Those with greater nighttime
wakefulness were more likely to score worse on tests of verbal fluency and
global cognition. - In France, nearly 5,000 mentally healthy French people over age 65
were evaluated four times over eight years. Researchers looked at
different aspects of insomnia and found that excessive daytime
sleepiness — which was reported by 18 percent of participants —
increased the risk of mental decline. Difficulty in staying asleep did
not. - Scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
obtained samples of blood and cerebrospinal fluid from three groups of
volunteers — those with dementia, a healthy age-matched set and a younger
set — over 36 hours and found that daily sleep patterns were linked to
levels of amyloid proteins. These proteins are recognized as an indicator
of Alzheimer’s disease.
While Snyder and Devore agreed that much more research is needed, the
studies potentially pave the way for sleep interventions that could stave
off mental deterioration.
“We may be able to help those individuals,” Snyder said. “If you’re
having problems with sleep, you may want to follow up with your health
care provider.”
Because research presented at scientific conferences has not been
peer-reviewed and published in a medical journal, results are considered
preliminary.
Also, if you suffer from insomnia, don’t worry that you’re doomed to
develop dementia. Although the studies report an association between sleep
disturbances and mental decline, they do not show a cause-and-effect
relationship.
More information
The American Sleep Association offers tips to achieve better sleep habits.
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