If you’re the type to read through online scientific data summaries, chances are you’re picturing an easily frustrated older person in the community with noticeably poor perception of things past and present! To date, research into AD is pretty-clear on the usual suspects that keep popping up in onset and progression among the human species: age, sex, heredity, cigarette smoking, vascular diseases, acquired brain injuries (how often, how intense) and how varied one has, does and continues to use one’s brain – AND – the apolipoprotein (APOE) ϵ4 gene. Not as well established is the specific role chronic mental health and/or sleep disturbance play in the development of AD. What we do know about the role of sleep and AD is that duration of nightly sleep and the neurochemical balances effect healthy memory among older persons.
Burke and colleagues from the Florida International University and Harvard School of Dental Medicine, conducted a study which predicted the adverse role of sleep disturbance, depression and anxiety on Alzheimer’s disease. Of 33,610 participants who volunteered from across 34 Alzheimer’s disease centres within the United States between 2005 and 2015, just over 9,000 met eligibility for the study. The researchers identified that among those with sleep disturbances, eventual diagnosis of AD was as significant as clinician-verified depression (with anxiety, independently, the most statistically significant). Additionally, the combination of sleep disturbance with anxiety was observed with a two-fold increase to the measured hazard ratio for eventual diagnosis of AD. The researchers state that the cost to screen and treat depression, anxiety and sleep disorders is observed to far outweigh the worldwide costs of treating Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (Prince et al., 2015, as cited by Burke et al., 2022).
Find original article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jocn.2022.07.012
