A new study of more than 27,000 people over several years suggests poor sleep health may cause your brain to age faster and create a "brain-age gap".
KERA's Sam Baker talked about this with Dr. Athica Vatanapradith, a sleep physician with Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
Dr. Vatanapradith: Let's say if you're 40, but your brain age is 50 years old. That is a 10-year gap. The higher the brain age gap, the higher the mortality in the patient. It can also lead to a higher risk of cognitive decline, aka the development of dementia or other neurodegenerative disorders.
The study boils down to the fact that sleep is a possible modifiable factor that may influence brain health.
Baker: The study suggested inflammation may be at work?
Dr. Vatanapradith: The researchers picked certain inflammatory markers, and they would do blood work and things like that. So, if there was an elevation in these markers, inflammation does play a role in about 10 percent of the cases. So, that's what contributes to that overall brain age gap.
What is inflammation doing that causes this?
Dr. Vatanapradith: It's a systemic inflammation. It plays a role in many different neuropathologies. So, it can increase risk of having strokes and having protein accumulation in the brain.
So, one of those is amyloid plaques, which is seen in people with Alzheimer's Disease. That's kind of how it affects the brain.
So, the overall suggestion here is to try to get better sleep. What's the best way or ways to do that?
Dr. Vatanapradith: The easiest one is to be screened for obstructive sleep apnea. That can improve your sleep duration. That can improve snoring, daytime sleepiness. It can even improve sleep maintenance insomnia, which means your ability to stay asleep at night once you have fallen asleep. And those are four of the metrics that they used to define healthy sleep.
If you don't have that, what should the average person do to try to make sure that they are maintaining good sleep health?
Dr. Vatanapradith: Sleep routine. Make sure you're obtaining enough hours of sleep, seven to eight hours on average. That is generally the goal.
If you already know that you're regarding schedules and things like that, it's very easy to de-prioritize sleep. Just make sure you're prioritizing sleep now that we know a lot of things can come from poor sleep. That's one of the things that can really help.
By the way, when we're talking about poor sleep health, are we talking about something chronic, or is this something a person who may have periodic trouble from stress now and then might have to worry about?
Dr. Vatanapradith: The more chronic something is, the more downstream effects there may be. It can affect your oxygenation level when you're sleeping.
So, if someone has trouble sleeping and we know that it is situational due to stress, due to certain life events, yes, we do help to try to help that patient obtain better sleep in certain ways. However, we know that this is more of a temporary cause of poor sleep.
So good sleep health is that important a thing?
Dr. Vatanapradith: Not only for quality of life because of how you feel, it also helps to lower the risks of other comorbid conditions like your risk of stroke and your risk of congestive heart failure.
But I think a lot of times it's more about quality of life. You want to feel rested, and you want to feel like you're not drowsy but functional during the day. So I think that's really important. Yes.
RESOURCES:
Poor sleep speeds brain aging and may raise dementia risk
Bad Sleep Linked To Accelerated Brain Aging
Brain Basics: Understanding Sleep
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