Improved
Sleep May Help Elderly Ward Off Diseases
April 05, 2017 1:17 PM
·
Jessica Berman
Scientists are
investigating poor quality of sleep as the source for many diseases of aging, including
heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. They are working
on ways to improve the
amount of restful sleep that elderly people get, which researchers believe
could promote much healthier lives.
We spend approximately
one-third of our lives asleep. In an ideal world, the time spent sleeping is
restful, helping to refresh both alertness and memory.
As we age, though,
experts say the quality and quantity of sleep becomes poor and fragmented,
because the neurons and brain circuits that regulate sleep slowly degrade.
It’s a downhill
process they say begins in a person’s 30s. By the time someone is in their 50s,
sleep scientists say the average person has lost 50 percent of their capacity
for restful sleep, and has trouble falling asleep and staying asleep overnight.
From middle age on, sleep specialists say the problems with restful sleep only
get worse.
Matthew Walker, a
professor of neuroscience and psychology at University of California at
Berkeley, is director of the school’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab.
He said dream-state or
rapid eye movement sleep, known as REM sleep, remains mostly intact as we age.
What tends to fall off is non-REM sleep, the deep sleep that leaves people
feeling refreshed in the morning.
As people age, their
risk of developing heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease rises. Those
conditions are commonly believed to interfere with sleep.
But Walker suggests
the problem may be the other way around, "or at least it’s a two-way
street I think, and maybe the fact that it’s flowing in more so than one
direction. In other words, I think sleep disruption is a novel,
underappreciated fact that is contributing to age and dementia as we get
older.”
In a meta-analysis,
Walker and colleagues reviewed data on 2 million people, in a study reported in
the journal Neuron. When they looked at electrical patterns of sleep in
sleep-deprived adults, they found slow waves and so-called “sleep spindles,” or
bursts of brain activity, which disrupt non-REM sleep.
They also found
chemical markers “in spades,” as one researcher put it, in people deprived of
restful, non-REM sleep.
Walker said virtually
all body systems are affected by a lack of sleep, including the cardiovascular
and metabolic systems, which may help explain why people whose sleep is
fragmented are more likely to develop heart disease and diabetes.
But Walker said he
believes there is a “silver lining” in the findings. Scientists are finding
targets to remedy sleep problems, potentially heading off diseases of aging.
“We’re trying to develop new sleep therapies to try and generate and assist the
aging brain to produce healthy quality of sleep and fight back against the
aging and dementia process.”
Walker said novel
therapies include stimulating sleep centers in the brain with extremely mild
electrical current and magnetism.
In the meantime, he
said there are things people can do to improve their quality of sleep. They
include exercising, avoiding work on computers and tablet devices before bed
that make it harder to fall asleep, and sleeping in a cool room, which also
seems to ease people into the very necessary and restful part of their day.
