Disturbed sleep & AD

[KatieS]

Another study of 200,000 Veterans associating disturbed sleep and dementia:
http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scrip ... ewsID=2098

[Stavia]

I wonder if its association and not cause - ie does the AD cause the sleep disturbance or vice versa?

[circular]

I think since they're finding that we clear AB (and I think other toxins?) while we sleep, that it's the lack of sleep contributing to AD, just like all the other bad western lifestyle habits.

[KatieS]

Stavia,we won't know the answer if sleep apnea causes AD or if those of use with sleep apnea, actually have the early brain changes of AD until the NYU study ends in 2015. Perhaps, the Veteran's study will have further analysis earlier. Of course, I hope Cir is right. But it haunts me how placid my EEG was, just completely unresponsive to severe hypoxia. I don't have the courage to submit to an amyloid scan.

[Stavia]

Yip, I know the theory about amyloid clearing during sleep, just wondering if the flip side has definitely been excluded. Would be more hope for insomniacs

[Welcomeaboard]

DNA synthesis and repair goes on while you sleep, so no sleep no synthesis and repair, sort of like one glass of wine is good and 14 is bad. I hour lack of sleep may be ok here and there but 4 hours all the time is bad. Generalized concept, the numbers are not accurate numbers and could be much less.

[Gilgamesh]

Speaking of sleep, Stavia, I'm thinking of what I said earlier, along the lines of "simply trusting a trustworthy person's wisdom" (that of you and your neurologist), especially when it comes to the "Z drugs": I'm starting to wonder whether the damage caused by not enough zzz's is greater than the damage caused by one of the Z's -- esp. zolpidem, the most benign of the Z's. Nothing else is working. . . .

But I'm scheduled for a sleep study at the end of the month, so perhaps something helpful will be revealed then.

[Julie G]

(((G)))

[circular]

Just in case any of you missed the thread on the Brainwave app, here's a link. It may not work for all, but it's made a very big difference in how much sleep I get and how deeply I sleep. I do take about 4.5 mg of melatonin before bed, but that never helped me sleep before, so I take it just to cover any deficiency that might be there. I usually use the "dreamy sleep" program for 8 hours because it weaves in different sleep states. The programmer emailed me this: "My background is a mixture of physics, software development, and various forms of acoustic and signal processing research." The sleep study specialists need to make an app that is *exactly* the sequence of a good night's sleep. I'm not sure how close this is, but based on my progress, I'm willing to gamble it's much better than all the lack of sleep I had before using it.

viewtopic.php?f=20&t=481&hilit=brainwave

[Doctor Lost]

APOE4 and obstructive sleep apnea

http://www.bumc.bu.edu/pulmonary/files/ ... tlieb1.pdf