Missing Out On Deep Sleep Causes Alzheimer's Plaques to Build Up

'Deep, non-REM sleep helps people's brains to wash away toxic proteins and waste, a new study found, reinforcing the link between sleep deprivation, aging and Alzheimer's disease,' reports U.S. News & World Report.
Or, as Discover magazine puts it, 'Getting enough deep sleep might be the key to preventing dementia.'

The discovery reinforces how critical quality sleep is for brain health and suggests sleep therapies might curb the advance of memory-robbing ailments, like Alzheimer's disease... Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) churns through a system of brain tunnels piped in the spaces between brain cells and blood vessels. Scientists call it the glymphatic system. This system circulates nutrients like glucose, the brain's primary energy source, and washes away potentially toxic waste. And it may be the reason why animals even need sleep. The system takes out the brain's trash when we're asleep, and it shuts down when we're awake.

Maiken Nedergaard, a neurologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, who led the new research, and her team were curious if the system works best and clears more waste -- like Alzheimer's causing beta amyloid plaque -- when animals are in deep sleep. To find out, the researchers used six different anesthetics to put mice into deep sleep. Then they tracked cerebrospinal fluid as it flowed into the brain. As the mice slept, the researchers watched the rodents' brain activity on an electroencephalograph, or EEG, and recorded the animals' blood pressures and heart and respiratory rates. Mice anesthetized with a combination of two drugs, ketamine and xylazine, showed the strongest deep sleep brain waves and these brain waves predicted CSF flow into the brain, the researchers found.

The lead researcher now argues that focusing on sleep in the early stages of dementia 'might be able to slow progression of the disease.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.