admin For healthy young men, the loss of one night’s sleep increases the levels of tau protein in their blood compared to getting a complete night of uninterrupted sleep and higher levels of tau protein in the blood is associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease according to a preliminary study.
On Wednesday, the study was published in the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Dr. Jonathan Cedernaes study author and a neurologist at Uppsala University in Sweden said, “Our exploratory study shows that even in young, healthy individuals, missing one night of sleep increases the level of tau in blood suggesting that over time, such sleep deprivation could possibly have detrimental effects.”
Tau is a protein that helps stabilize the internal makeup of brain nerve cells and an abnormal form causes the interior of the cell to fall apart. When these abnormal tau proteins clump they form “tangles” — a key sign of Alzheimer’s, frontal lobe dementia and Lewy body disease, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
During sleep for a healthy person, tau and other toxins in the brain are cleared away. Thus, losing sleep, or having disordered sleep in which sleep cycles are disrupted, can interfere with the brain’s ability to clean up.
Researchers found in this study that men who had a good night’s sleep only showed an average 2% increase of tau in their blood; men who were not allowed to sleep had an average 17% increase of tau in their blood.
Researchers caution that the study is small and inconclusive, and acknowledged they were not able to determine what the increased levels might mean. “Higher levels in the blood may reflect that these tau proteins are being cleared from the brain or they may reflect elevated tau levels in the brain. Future studies are needed to investigate this further,” Cedernaes said. “This study raises more questions than answers,” agreed Dexter. “What this is telling us is that we have to dig more deeply. Despite something we do for a third of our lives, we know so little about sleep and we’re learning every day, particularly when it comes to sleep and dementia.”
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