If You Don't Sleep Well, You May Get Dementia
" With the increase of human lifespan, aging diseases are becoming more and more common, such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and ALS involved in the ice bucket challenge in previous years. Alzheimer's patients' brain hippocampus neurons age and die, Problems with memory.
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| "Nap"/Van Gogh |
As human lifespans increase, geriatric diseases are becoming more common, such as Alzheimer's (senile dementia), Parkinson's disease, and ALS, which was involved in the Ice Bucket Challenge in previous years. These diseases are collectively referred to as neurodegenerative diseases. To put it bluntly, specific nerve cells age and die. When nerve cells die, problems arise in the memory and movement they control.
Patients with neurodegenerative diseases are often accompanied by the accumulation of "toxic" proteins such as Aβ and Tau in nerve cells, and a recent study published in the journal Science shows that sleep deprivation can also cause these proteins to be abnormally high in the brain. .
Neuronal cells in the hippocampus of the brain of Alzheimer's patients age, die, and memory problems occur. commons.wikimedia.org
The lab of David M. Holtzman at the University of Washington published an article in Science on Friday explaining the relationship between sleep and Alzheimer's, providing new evidence for understanding how sleep affects neurodegenerative diseases.
Some special proteins are like garbage that cannot be removed from the brain, disrupting normal physiological functions in and out of cells. For example, the Aβ protein and Tau protein of Alzheimer's patients will accumulate with age, and mutations in some related genes will accelerate this process. Research in recent years has found that some of these proteins, such as Tau, also travel along nerve cells in the brain.
Everyone gets neurodegenerative diseases if they live long enough.
People with neurodegenerative diseases experience sleep disturbance very early on. wikipedia.org
This also confirms the saying "early to bed and early to rise is good for health". If you don't sleep well at night, you will feel that your brain is not enough during the day. If you think about it this way, if you don't sleep well for a long time, your brain may be completely broken.
In fact, the relationship between sleep, circadian rhythms and neurodegenerative diseases has long been studied. For example, some Parkinson's patients have sleep disorders several years before the onset of movement disorders. In some related animal models, sleep deprivation has also been found to accelerate the disease process, but the specific mechanisms are still unclear.
Back to this study. Previously, Holzman's lab has found that the amount of Aβ fluctuates with sleep. In the latest study, they found that the amount of Tau protein in the interstitial fluid of mice also fluctuates with sleep: during sleep, Tau decreases ; Tau nearly doubles when awake.
What If I Don't Sleep Well?
Disrupting the sleep of mice through environmental disturbance or activation of wake-promoting brain regions significantly increased Tau in the mice's tissue fluid. The results were the same in humans. One night without sleep, the Tau protein in the cerebrospinal fluid increased by more than 50%, and there was also a significant increase in Aβ and α-synuclein, which is associated with Parkinson's disease.
What does an increase in extracellular tau protein mean? Further experiments found that chronic sleep deprivation promotes the spread of mutant tau in the brain. This suggests that abnormal sleep can lead to neurodegenerative diseases through the increase and spread of Tau and other proteins.
Why do sleep disturbances cause these specific proteins to increase in extracellular fluid?
The researchers found that by inhibiting neuronal activity with drugs, Tau protein was no longer increased, suggesting that neuronal activity and metabolism regulate the amount of Tau in the tissue fluid of cells.
Although limited by technical means, it is difficult for researchers to directly monitor the expression of Tau in real time in cells, and how Tau and other proteins in the extracellular fluid increase and affect, which requires further research, but it is necessary to get rid of dementia and other diseases by sleeping well. Not a bad idea.
References
1. JK Holth et al., Science 10.1126/science.aav2546 (2019).
2. https://neuro.wustl.edu/labs/holtzman_d/Lab-Home/About-the-Lab