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Chronic insomnia can be bad for more than your sleep program – it can accelerate brain aging according to a new study.
People with chronic insomnia or those who have at least three nights per week for three months or more, 40% more often develop dementia or easy cognitive problems than people who sleep normally, according to a study published in Journal of neurology.
This leads to an additional 3.5 years of brain aging, according to the study.
The results “are added to the growing number of evidence that sleep is not only a vacation – it also applies to the durability of the brain,” said Diego Diego Z. Carvalia, one of the authors of the study and a neurologist in the American Clinic Mayo.
The team of Carvalia watched as 2750 elderly Americans, who were on average healthy for almost six years. Participants – 16% of which were diagnosed with insomnia – regularly passed the memory and testing of thinking, and in some some scans of the brain were also made.
In general, 14% of people with insomnia developed dementia or slight cognitive disorders compared to 10% of people without insomnia. People with chronic insomnia also had a more intense decrease in thinking tests over the years.
“We have seen a faster drop in thinking skills and changes in the brain, which suggest that chronic insomnia can be a timely preventive sign or even a factor that contributes to future cognitive problems,” said Carvalia.
The results were preserved even after the researchers took into account factors such as age, high blood pressure, apnea in a dream and the use of sleeping drugs.
However, it is worth noting that they did not prove that insomnia causes brain health problems, just that these two phenomena are connected. You will need more studies to understand exactly why they seem to be connected.
The study also showed that chronic insomnia, in the same way, affects the health of the brain of some people more than others.
Participants who said that they slept less than ordinary, had more white supernavors of substances, or bright spots in lesions that signal the lesions, and amyloid plates, or proteins that can accumulate in the brain and are associated with the disease.
The levels of their amyloid plaques were similar to those that were usually observed in people who carry the APOE4 gene option, which increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease according to the study.
Participants in the APOE4 variant also saw a more significant reduction in memory and thinking skills.
“Our results show that insomnia can affect the brain in the brain, as for not only amyloid plates, but also small vessels that nourish the blood brain,” Karvalia said.
Conclusions are the last to find The relationship between sleeping and brain health. Chronic insomnia and poor sleep quality also increase the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, depression and obesity.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), dementia affects about 57 million people around the world. Insomnia affects about 16.2% of people in countries with affordable quality data.
The latest study “increases the importance of treating chronic insomnia – not only to improve the quality of sleep, but also to protect the health of the brain with age,” said Carvalia.