Your sleeping habits can directly impact your brain’s health, and the health of your brain can affect how you sleep. So when your body is experiencing one or multiple chronic sleep disturbances, it could potentially signal something deeper ― including dementia.
“The relationship between sleep disturbances and dementia is an important dynamic, and rapidly evolving area of investigation,” said Dr. Arman Fesharaki-Zadeh, assistant professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine. “There’s a strong association between sleep disruption ― particularly impairment of slow-wave sleep (SWS), also referred to as deep sleep ― and an increased risk of developing dementia. Alterations in sleep architecture, including reductions in SWS, may serve as early biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease.”
Your brain has a network called the glymphatic system that clears toxins while you sleep. These toxins include amyloid beta, a protein that builds up in the brain as dementia develops. So if you are experiencing sleep disturbances that significantly alter your sleep-wake cycle, your body could be giving you an early warning sign.
Additionally, memories form in your brain in three stages: encoding, consolidation and retrieval. “Consolidation is critically supported by deep and REM sleep and stabilizes and integrates newly acquired information, including emotional contextualization. Retrieval enables access to stored memory traces,” according to Fesharaki-Zadeh. “Disruption of sleep, particularly during consolidation stages, can contribute to persistent memory impairment.”
