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Medicine Science

Deep Sleep May Help the Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins (npr.org) 57

Posted by BeauHD from the connecting-the-dots dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The brain waves generated during deep sleep appear to trigger a cleaning system in the brain that protects it against Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases. Electrical signals known as slow waves appear just before a pulse of fluid washes through the brain, presumably removing toxins associated with Alzheimer's, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science. The finding could help explain a puzzling link between sleep and Alzheimer's, says Laura Lewis, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering at Boston University. The finding also suggests that people might be able to reduce their risk of Alzheimer's by ensuring that they get high-quality sleep, says William Jagust, a professor of public health and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.
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Deep Sleep May Help the Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins More

Deep Sleep May Help the Brain Clear Alzheimer's Toxins

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  • Sleep on it. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ostracus ( 1354233 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @12:19AM (#59368744) Journal

    Combine this story with the one's about the epidemic of sleep deprivation and much is explained.

  • Wonky (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @01:57AM (#59368866)

    This seems wonky .. i thought the elderly who sleep a lot seem to get dementia rather than those who use their mind a lot .. but then I dont really know. Obviously I only have pure speculation and hearsay anecdotal evidence against their hard science .. i just hope they did it properly to get to their conclusion.

    • It is possible that long sleep duration may be the result of dementia, or developing dementia, rather than the cause. Nothing in this study [nih.gov] rules that out. "Correlation is not causation."

    • Re:Wonky (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bite The Pillow ( 3087109 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @04:22AM (#59369006)

      It's a specific kind of deep sleep that people just dozing all night won't get.

      Diazepam and Benadryl are "associated with" dementia, likely signaling a disturbed sleep pattern due to anxiety, and self medication for OTC stuff. Either could result from not enough of the right sleep.

      And as usual, it doesn't make sense to second guess science unless you're at least in the field and up on the state of the art. Science asserts things that seem true now. You can do experiments that support or contradict, poke holes in the method, or pick your nose and say "gee I don't know, in my totally nonscientific experience this doesn't seem right."

      • Re:Wonky (Score:5, Funny)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @04:30AM (#59369018) Journal

        You can do experiments that support or contradict, poke holes in the method, or pick your nose and say "gee I don't know, in my totally nonscientific experience this doesn't seem right."

        In fairness, one of those is much easier to do than the others.

        • Poke holes in the method?

        • You can do experiments that support or contradict, poke holes in the method, or pick your nose and say "gee I don't know, in my totally nonscientific experience this doesn't seem right."

          In fairness, one of those is much easier to do than the others.

          Remember, it's cold and flu season. Pick carefully.

    • Re: Wonky (Score:5, Informative)

      by Evtim ( 1022085 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:25AM (#59369098)

      During sleep the brain cleans itself chemically from undesirable byproduct accumulated during normal operation. It does it 10 times faster than during wake time. One of the byproduct is a protein associated with the disease.
      Source "Why do we sleep" by Matthew Walker.

    • Staying in bed a lot doesn't equate to sleeping a lot.

      Also, some people with Alzheimers tend to be pretty lucid in the morning after waking up, but then by the afternoon, they're unable to recognize their children.

      PS: My experience is better than your experience because mine comes from Hollywood TV dramas.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by hufter ( 542690 )
      Don't sleep all the time, sleep enough. 7 to 9 hours a day is enough for most people. Use your mind when you are awake. Don't watch TV all the time.

    • I'm severely sleep deprived due to chronic pain and the only way to pass out is pain meds.
      What little REM sleep I get is thanks to cannabis (cannabis is also why I've managed to be on opiates for many years while only increasing does during flare ups and subsequently reverting to baseline) and I've tried all the (nasty) big pharma options.
      Many elders "sleep" so much because it's not restive sleep.

    • This is from Deep Sleep. If people have problems with Deep Sleep, they are often tired more often, and will fall asleep. But it isn't the same quality of sleep.

    • As you get older the quality of your sleep goes down; less hours in REM sleep -- so you're sleeping more, but it's poor quality, so you need more of it. (See also: alcohol)

      But maybe you're looking at the causality in reverse? The ones getting poor sleep lose their mental acuity, and need to sleep more -- whereas the ones able to sleep normally stay sharper, longer.

  • Alarm clocks are evil (Score:3)

    by weilawei ( 897823 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @04:11AM (#59368990)

    Better to structure your sleep to not use one, if you can avoid it. I still set them, but I try to make sure they're set a few minutes after I'd naturally wake up. I sleep almost exactly 6 hours, so if I set an alarm for 6:05, I don't wake up feeling groggy.

    • In general you shouldn't use the Alarm Clock to Wake you up every morning. But just as a tool to help you get up when you oversleep once every few weeks.

      However when I was in High School, back in the old days. The school bus picked me up at 6:40am every morning. This didn't work well with my teenage sleep schedule. So I needed an alarm every morning, so I could catch the bus in time.

      • I had an alarm clock in high school, too. It was mostly useless.

        The only thing that really worked was when my dad would eventually come in and take away all of the bed coverings.

      • The typical high school schedule is very out-of-step with typical teenage sleep cycles. That was the worst thing about high school for me, getting up early enough to the 6:40am bus. It makes much more sense to have the elementary kids go early as they tend to be early to bed, early to rise, and flip it for high schoolers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geek ( 5680 )

      Better to structure your sleep to not use one, if you can avoid it. I still set them, but I try to make sure they're set a few minutes after I'd naturally wake up. I sleep almost exactly 6 hours, so if I set an alarm for 6:05, I don't wake up feeling groggy.

      They have some cool alarm clocks out there now that use "natural" light to wake you. They gradually grow brighter and brighter like the sun coming up. Cool concept, no idea how good they really are but they would certainly be less jarring than a loud ass noise.

      I wake at the same time every day naturally, havent used an alarm in probably 20 years. I just wish the time I woke up was a little later :)

      • I'm with you there - I've been getting up at exactly the same time for work for decades, and now I wake up that same time on weekends, vacations, etc - very annoying. Doesn't help that my dogs are on that schedule too, so they wake me up if somehow I manage to sleep in.

      • I've programmed my phillips hue lights to do a natural sunrise every morning. Goes from dark through dawn to "blue sky bright sun" over the course of about 1.5 hrs. I'm usually up about 1/3 of the way through that, even in the dead of winter.

  • Other angle on Alzheimer (Score:5, Informative)

    by fuzzyf ( 1129635 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @05:08AM (#59369070)
    I just learned about Alzheimers and its connection with Keto (or ketosis), which really suprised me. I'm expecting there to me much more research into this connection soon.

    Quote from
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
    "Single studies with human participants have demonstrated a reduction of disease symptoms after application."

    Hugely simplified (any maybe a bit wrong) summary from what I understand:
    Basically it seems the brain cannot use bloodsugar as fuel any more, and braincells die due to lack of energy. But the body really has two ways of providing energy, one is through bloodsugar and the other is using ketones (from fat). Of course it's really early, but it looks really interesting.

    There are a couple of books available atm, with more information:
    Like this one:
    https://www.amazon.com/dp/1603... [amazon.com]

    So we actually have something that directly works, at least with some of the symptoms of Alzheimers.
    • From the conclusion of the article you link : "Further studies are necessary, especially for research of long-term KD effects on the symptoms and course of neurodegenerative diseases, as well as on the general well-being of affected patients."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fuzzyf ( 1129635 )
        Absolutely. This is by no means a cure or cause. But it is still very interesting that ketosis reduces symptoms like this.
        I'm also seeing people referring to Alzheimers as Diabetes type 3, but that doesn't mean anything by itself.

        Looking forward to more research on this topic.
    • That's interesting - everything I've heard about Alzheimers is that the symptoms are caused by amyloid plaque build up on the neurons - blocking signal transmission.
      While I could see Keto slowing/stopping the plaque build up - I don't see how it could reverse it other than normal body processes can finally keep up and do the clean up themselves but that would seem to be slow to reverse. (Of course even the amyloid plaque theory is just that and hasn't been confirmed as THE culprit - just that it appears t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fuzzyf ( 1129635 )
        I don't think it reverses anything. It just provides an alternative energy source for a while.
        But I do not have any knowledge other than google-foo, so I could certainly be wrong.

        That being said, these studies looks legit, so it certainly looks like there is something to this. Not a cure or direct cause, but still interesting.
      • Most neuroscientists now say the plaques are a symptom, not the cause, of Alzheimer's.

  • How often do you need deep sleep to clear the brain of these toxins? If you have a couple of bad nights of sleep, how long to recover?
    Thirdly, and it's a serious question: if you sleep off a hangover, does that count as deep sleep?

    • At a guess? Probably an amount that corresponds to an average of about 8 hours of normal sleep a day - there wouldn't be a whole lot of evolutionary pressure to develop a toxin-clearing system that requires dramatically less sleep than all the other reasons you have to sleep.

      As for sleeping off a hangover - my guess would be no. Drug-induced sleep almost never counts as effective sleep for biological purposes.

    • Normally for healthy people, a couple of bad nights isn't going to be much of an issue. If you wash your bathtub every day, it is an easy clean, however if you skip a few days while it may be a little dirtier cleaning it wouldn't be much harder. However if you don't clean your tub for months or a year. Then you have a really hard cleaning job.

      Hangovers are mostly from dehydration, not as much from extra brain toxins. There are toxins while you are drunk however most of them are cleared away when you are

      • Hangovers are usually a result of still being drunk. Just ask a cop how many hungover people blow over the limit at 8am after they "slept it off". It'll surprise you.

  • For people with beginning symptoms of Alzheimer's syndrome perhaps sufferers should be artificially put into deep sleep and monitored. Even advanced cases could be used as test cases to see if any reversal of symptoms is possible.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pyramid ( 57001 )

      The problem is that being "artificially put to sleep" more often than not prevents quality REM sleep.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Joosy ( 787747 )

        The problem is that being "artificially put to sleep" more often than not prevents quality REM sleep.

        That may be true, but deep sleep, which the article discusses, is not the same as REM sleep

  • Sleep (Score:4, Informative)

    by quanminoan ( 812306 ) on Friday November 01, 2019 @10:44AM (#59369534)

    If anyone is interested in the science of sleep I would recommend "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker. Lots of science supports how a good night's sleep is tied to physical and mental health.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epine ( 68316 )

      From Walker's book (or talking tour):

      Men who get less sleep (5 hours v. 8 hours) have smaller testicles and less testosterone.

  • Does it count when I fall asleep during those boring meetings at work?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It's interesting to note that, in many circles, Alzheimer's is also referred to as Type 3 Diabetes. One observation is that in dementia patients, neurones have become insulin-resistant.

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