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Medicine

Long Naps May Be Early Sign of Alzheimer's Disease, Study Shows (newatlas.com) 49

Posted by BeauHD from the studies-that-will-make-you-drink-more-coffee dept.
Taking long naps could be a precursor of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study that tracked the daytime sleeping habits of elderly people. The Guardian reports: The scientists think it is more likely that excessive napping could be an early warning sign, rather than it causing mental decline. The scientists tracked more than 1,000 people, with an average age of 81, over several years. Each year, the participants wore a watch-like device to track mobility for up to 14 days. Each prolonged period of non-activity from 9am to 7pm was interpreted as a nap. The participants also underwent tests to evaluate cognition each year. At the start of the study 76% of participants had no cognitive impairment, 20% had mild cognitive impairment and 4% had Alzheimer's disease.

For participants who did not develop cognitive impairment, daily daytime napping increased by an average 11 minutes a year. The rate of increase doubled after a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment to a total of 24 minutes and nearly tripled to a total of 68 minutes after a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, according to the research published in the journal Alzheimer's and dementia. Overall, participants who napped more than an hour a day had a 40% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's than those who napped less than an hour a day; and participants who napped at least once a day had a 40% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's than those who napped less than once a day.
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Long Naps May Be Early Sign of Alzheimer's Disease, Study Shows More

Long Naps May Be Early Sign of Alzheimer's Disease, Study Shows

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  • Put the old cunts on speed, that'll sort em out. Too many people stop taking recreational drugs as they get older.

    • Too many people stop taking recreational drugs as they get older.

      I was on Ritalin (aka "kiddie speed") for ADD as a child. Hated the shit. Gave me insomnia and anxiety while I was on it. Ultimately I still had a difficult time at school and earn a relatively crappy living as an adult, so those studies that say giving drugs to kids doesn't really improve their overall prospects at success might be on to something.

      Be interesting to see what it does to geriatrics, though. Seems like poetic justice to give the boomers the same drugs they forced upon their kids.

      • Re:amphetamines (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Baconsmoke ( 6186954 ) on Thursday March 17, 2022 @10:09PM (#62367863)
        Because punishing an entire group of people for the actions of a few is always a good idea?

      • Too many people stop taking recreational drugs as they get older.

        I was on Ritalin (aka "kiddie speed") for ADD as a child. Hated the shit. Gave me insomnia and anxiety while I was on it. Ultimately I still had a difficult time at school and earn a relatively crappy living as an adult, so those studies that say giving drugs to kids doesn't really improve their overall prospects at success might be on to something.

        Be interesting to see what it does to geriatrics, though. Seems like poetic justice to give the boomers the same drugs they forced upon their kids.

        Of course it screws kids up. Children's minds are still growing, and the diagnosis of ADD was just a chemical straitjacket so that male students wouldn't be a problem. After getting rid of most male teachers because as males, we are though of as all sexual predators, the female teachers needed something to control the males. I know that they tried to put my kid on ADD chemical straitjackets, and I told them to slag off. I put him in Ice Hockey, and it worked like a charm. Well behaved, and no one dared bull

    • "Too many people stop taking recreational drugs as they get older."

      I'm 66 ind the EU and I'm getting 90 grams of 9/18 Cannabis from the state for free each month because I have a prescription.
      Why should I let that go to waste?

  • Ohhh, naps. I thought they said napster

    • Napster?? Being stuck in a time warp could also be an early sign of Alzzers.

    • Ohhh, naps. I thought they said napster

      If they're trying to download music from Napster and then ask if you can pick up their prescription from "Eckerd's", that's probably a good sign of failing mental facilities too.

  • Too long, will read after my nap.

    • Each prolonged period of non-activity from 9am to 7pm was interpreted as a nap.

      Shit, that puts about half the guys I work with at high risk of Alzheimers...

      • "Shit, that puts about half the guys I work with at high risk of Alzheimers..."

        Stop doing blow all night then you'll be up during the day.

  • /. has an interesting story.

  • Check these people out: https://redlightsonthebrain.bl... [redlightsonthebrain.blog]

    It is well known that plants use sunlight to produces energy. Surprisingly, in the past few decades researchers found certain frequencies of light helps the human body too – by energising it at a cellular level! This practise is called ‘Photobiomodulation’ (also called as ‘Low-Level Light Therapy’). It involves application of low levels of light to improve body functioning and help it repair damage caused by several disea

    • There are a lot of pieces of the picture coming together in recent Alzheimer's Disease research. Mitochondrial dysfunction and circadian rhythm problems (which leads to naps) both go along with AD and seem to be the primary disease, with the amyloid plaques being a late symptom due to the poor sleep patterns. Red light therapy specifically changes how the mitochondria function in the same way that circadian rhythm is supposed to. So it's possible that you could "trick" a faulty cell into thinking it's da

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by t0qer ( 230538 )

      I thought red light therapy was a crackpot idea, until I got a compound fracture of the ring finger last November. During my physical therapy, they used ultrasound to break up the scar tissue. While it wasn't a huge improvement, with each session I did get another 5 degrees of movement from the finger.

      I think red light therapy is sort of in the same boat. 30 years ago people likely might have said ultrasound for anything outside of imaging is crackpot science, but now the science is practice.

  • If I found the world bewildering, I'd probably also find that experience exhausting.

    Not to mention, I'd probably prefer the experience of a good nap to frustrating, bewildering interactions.

    • From what I've read they think part of your sleep cycle is cleaning your brain and people who lack sleep or have poor quality sleep end up slowly building crud up in their brain that leads to these brain problems later in life... combined with other variables that help or harm this... because if it was simply a single variable problem we'd easily have figured the cause out by now.

      This looks like a correlation problem; where people who get poor sleep have patterns or symptoms which show up as correlated when

  • Now that I have your attention, Trump does not take naps and sleeps about 4 hours each day.

  • ... or any number of other valid reasons. Seems like life-style would have a big role to play in the signal. Maybe the best you can still say is: over age 80 you have a chance at getting alzheimer's.

  • From TFA: "Each prolonged period of non-activity from 9am to 7pm was interpreted as a nap" Riiiight. And if the individual was reading for hours at a time? That would be counted as "non-activity". Very scientific....

  • I've been napping a bit more over the past few years. Most of the time it's a 15 or 20 minute nap but I set an alarm on my phone or tablet for 30 minutes because I'll occasionally be pretty tired. And a vast majority of the time I'll wake up in 15 or 20 minutes. Once in a while at almost 30 minutes or am wakened at 30 minutes by the alarm. And seldom, I'll "snooze" for another 30 minutes.

    I do get about 7 hours of sleep each night, 10pm to around 5am depending on when the cats decide to try and wake me up. I

  • This is relevant to the alzheimer's part, but not to the naps part... Sorry !

    Alzheimers apparently has a smell that can predate an official diagnosis by quite a long time. This article is very interesting indeed:

    https://blog.thealzheimerssite... [greatergood.com]

    On the subject of naps, as I understand it, lack of sleep is one of the possible causes of dementia type symtoms. YMMV

  • So, my cat has Alzheimer's?!

  • Just DuckDuckGo a study that says the opposite:

    https://blisssaigon.com/good-n... [blisssaigon.com]

    I'm screwed because I wake up in the middle of the night and can't go back to sleep. I kind of do a split sleeping pattern because of this (Go to be early, wake up for a few hours in the middle of the night, go back to sleep until morning). I'm not sure what constitutes a nap with me, because it is sort of not a nap and just sleeping for me. The alternative is chancing waking up at 3:00 in the morning and going all day on 4 hour

  • Carbs make you sleepy.
    Carbs cause diabetes.
    Alzheimers is Type III Diabetes.
    Naps don't cause Alzheimers.

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