AS LITTLE as 1% reduction in deep sleep per year for people over 60 years of age translates into a 27% increased risk of dementia, according to a Monash study.
Research suggests that enhancing or maintaining deep sleep, also known as slow-wave sleep, in older years could stave off dementia.
The study, led by A/Prof Matthew Pase, and published yesterday in JAMA Neurology, looked at 346 participants, over 60 years of age, enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study who completed two overnight sleep studies in the time periods 1995 to 1998 and 2001 to 2003, with five years between the two studies.
These participants were then carefully followed for dementia from the time of the second sleep study through to 2018.
The researchers found that the amount of deep sleep on average declined between the two studies, indicating slow-wave sleep loss with ageing.
Over the next 17 years of follow-up, there were 52 cases of dementia.
Even adjusting for age, sex, cohort, genetic factors, smoking status, sleeping medication use, antidepressant use, and anxiolytic use, each percentage decrease in deep sleep each year was associated with a 27% increase in the risk of dementia.
"Slow-wave sleep supports the ageing brain in many ways, and we know that sleep augments the clearance of metabolic waste from the brain, including facilitating the clearance of proteins that aggregate in Alzheimer's disease," Pase said.
"However, to date, we have been unsure of the role of slow-wave sleep in the development of dementia.
"Our findings suggest that slow-wave sleep loss may be a modifiable dementia risk factor," he added.
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