Daytime sleep duration could predict Alzheimer’s Dementia

If you find yourself dozing off frequently during the day, recent research reveals that it could be an early symptom of Alzheimer’s disease.

The memory-robbing disease damages areas of the brain that keep you alert during the day, which is why people with Alzheimer’s may slumber excessively long before they start forgetting things, according to the study’s authors.

Not only that, but the researchers discovered that a protein called tau causes damage to brain regions involved in daytime wakefulness. According to the researchers, this adds to the evidence that tau may play a bigger role in Alzheimer’s than the more well-studied amyloid protein.

“Our work shows definitive evidence that the brain areas promoting wakefulness degenerate due to accumulation of tau — not amyloid protein — from the very earliest stages of the disease,” says study senior author Dr. Lea Grinberg.

Previous research has suggested that extended napping is the result of poor sleep induced by Alzheimer’s-related abnormalities in brain regions that promote sleep, or that sleep problems contribute to the advancement of Alzheimer’s disease.

The brains of 13 deceased Alzheimer’s sufferers and seven people without the illness were examined in this study. The researchers found that Alzheimer’s disease targets brain regions involved in daytime wakefulness, and that these areas are among the first to be affected by the disease.

Excessive daytime sleeping, according to the research, maybe a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease.

Significant tau buildup was observed in all three wakefulness-promoting areas investigated by the researchers in Alzheimer’s patients’ brains, and those regions had lost up to 75 percent of their neurons.

The study’s findings were published in the Alzheimer’s and Dementia journal.

Study lead author Jun Oh explains: “It’s remarkable because it’s not just a single brain nucleus that’s degenerating, but the whole wakefulness-promoting network. Crucially, this means that the brain has no way to compensate because all of these functionally related cell types are being destroyed at the same time.”

“It seems that the wakefulness-promoting network is particularly vulnerable in Alzheimer’s disease,” Oh adds. “Understanding why this is the case is something we need to follow up in future research.”

This and other discoveries imply that tau buildup is more important than the more commonly researched amyloid protein in Alzheimer’s disease. According to the UCSF team, research into amyloid has so far failed to yield viable Alzheimer’s treatments.

Grinberg said that the “research adds to a growing body of work showing that tau burden is likely a direct driver of [mental] decline.”

SOURCE: University of California

Image Credit: Getty

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