A Good Night's Sleep

A Good Night’s Sleep

A new study  published this week in the journal SCIENCE, regarding potential ways to ward off dementia and Alzheimer’s disease as we age, is making the case that getting a good night’s sleep just might be the most important thing we can do. 

While sleeping, our brain has a self-cleaning process that flushes out the toxic waste our brain cells produce each day as they work.  This waste elimination process is a powerful illustration of the medical importance of sleep.   Researchers had suspected that this self-cleaning went on in our heads each night, but the new study put the process, and its intensity, in far clearer focus.  For example, the team witnessed that when mice slept, brain cells actually shrunk in size, expanding the spaces between them by as much as 60 percent and facilitating the flushing of waste.

At minimum, the research highlights the importance of regular sleep in slowing dementia, as well as the possible neurological risks of consistently getting too little sleep.  When we stay up until late into the night, we may be preventing our brains from flushing toxins effectively. 

Experts expressed hope that the new findings could lead to treatments for neurological ailments associated with cell waste in the brain, including Parkinson's disease as well as Alzheimer's and dementia. Scientists will be following up on the tantalizing possibility that Alzheimer's is exacerbated not as much by the buildup of beta-amyloid plaque in the brain as by an impaired ability to flush it out. If that turns out to be true, then the development of a drug to facilitate or force the self-cleaning process could be a major breakthrough. Doctors may also achieve better results by coordinating dementia patients' treatments with their sleep schedules.

Source: PBS Health and Well-Being

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