Sleep May Serve as a Marker of Alzheimer's Disease Risk and Progression

New research published in Current Biology suggests that plenty of deep, restorative sleep could help ward off Alzheimer's disease, reports News-Medical . University of California, Berkeley neuroscientists Matthew Walker and Joseph Winer have formulated a technique for calculating a time frame for when Alzheimer's is most likely to manifest. "The sleep you're having right now is almost like a crystal ball telling you when and how fast Alzheimer's pathology will develop in your brain," said Walker. "The silver lining here is that there's something we can do about it. 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." Participants who began experiencing more interrupted sleep and less non-rapid eye movement slow-wave sleep were most likely to show an increase in beta-amyloid plaque over the course of the study. "Measuring sleep effectively helps us travel into the future and estimate where your amyloid buildup will be," Walker noted, and he and Winer plan to use their findings to implement techniques to boost sleep quality. "Our hope is that if we intervene, then in three or four years the buildup is no longer where we thought it would be because we improved their sleep," said Winer.