Determining sleep ‘sweet spot’ could protect brain as you get older: Study

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New research has found that as we get older, the quality of sleep matters to our brain health.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Neurology, suggests that early on-set dementia and Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented with how many hours an adult sleeps, according to a new study.

Age-related changes in sleep have been linked to early signs of Alzheimer’s, depression and cardiovascular disease.

The researchers explored how much healthy aging is affected by sleep duration, and whether it plays a part in brain amyloid-β accumulation (a.k.a. how much beta amyloid, “a protein created during normal brain cell activity” builds up), cognitive performance, and lifestyle factors.

They studied 4,417 adults from the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan between the ages of 65 and 85 with normal cognition.

The study authors found that those who slept six hours or less, or nine hours or more faced “distinct deficits” in cognitive performance, as well as symptoms related to depression, body mass index and napping during the day.

Those who reported short sleep times had elevated levels of beta-amyloid, which “greatly increases” the risk for dementia, as it’s one of the first detectable markers in the progression of Alzheimer’s, the study’s lead author Joe Winer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, told CNN.

Sleeping too much was also associated with lesser executive function, but their beta-amyloid levels were considered normal.

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So it’s that sweet spot, between seven and nine hours, that is optimal for adults — or, frankly, anyone who is concerned about the study’s results or believes their sleep patterns are affecting their long-term health.

Nutshell? Older adults who experience inadequate sleep performed moderately to significantly worse on tests commonly used on older adults for identifying mild dementia and assessing cognitive abilities, including orientation, attention, memory, language and visual-spatial skills, reported CNN.

“The main takeaway is that it is important to maintain healthy sleep late in life,” said Winer, who believes that sleep is as important to health as is diet and exercise.

“Additionally, both people who get too little sleep and people who get too much sleep had higher (body-mass index and) more depressive symptoms.”