sleeping deprivation is also detrimental to your mental and physical health in terms of restricting one ‘s ability to concentrate.
- Approximately 70 million people worldwide have a sleeping problem.
- Emotional disturbances in sleeping may also impact risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as other diseases.
- Relatively early evidence from a mouse model suggests that a drug commonly used to treat insomnia may not only improve sleeping quality but also protect the brain against an accumulation of the tau protein, a study shows.
Up to 70 million people in the world have a sleeping disorder – such as insomnia or sleep apnea, researchers say.
Furthermore, previous research has shown that sleeping disturbance may increase a person’s risk of a number of diseases – including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, gastrointestinal problems, dementia (including Alzheimer’s disease), and high blood pressure (hypertension).
Sleep disorders and poor sleeping quality often come about years before other dementia symptoms — caused by Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders — arise, David M. Holtzman, MD, Barbara Burton and Reuben M. Morriss III Distinguished Professor of Neurology and scientific director of the Hope Center for Neurological Disorders at the Washington University School of Medicine told Medical News Today.
Holtzman said that on the basis of work done in our group and by other scientists disturbed sleeping plays a role in an increase in aberrant tau and amyloid plaques – two biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease.
He is the lead author of a recent study that was published recently in the journal Nature Neuroscience(Trusted Source) in which the team found that a drug that is often prescribed for insomnia may both improve the quality of sleeping and protect the brain from tau protein buildup.
How does lemborexant affect tau in the brain?
The researchers focused on lemborexant, a sleep-disorder drug (marketed under the brand name Dayvigo).
Samira Parhizkar, PhD, a professor at the Washington University School of Medicine and the lead author of the study, told MNT that lemborexant is one of a class of sleep aids called dual orexin receptor antagonists. “Orexin is the protein in our brain that keeps us awake and conscious, ” she said.
“The drug eases the path to more rapid and easier sleep by inhibiting orexin signaling, ” Parhizkar said. In other words, lemborexant helps shut off the light switch that keeps on flickering in your brain as you try to fall asleep, so your body and brain get the rest they need.
Lemborexant was given to a type of mouse that was genetically predisposed to brain tau accumulation, scientists report.
But “Tau protein acts like a ‘track’ in the healthy brain, supporting the structure of cells and serving to move nutrients and impulses where they are needed, ” Holtzman said
Alzheimer’s disease and tauopathies, a group of neurodegenerative diseases mostly brought on by aberrant tau, result in tau tangles because aberrant tau loses its structure, integrity, and cellular functions. He explained that one of the cognitive symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease that leads to memory loss and confusion is nerve cell death, which is brought on by the slow buildup of these tau tangles.
Lemborexant lowers inflammatory brain damage and stops tau accumulation.
At the end of the study, researchers found that giving the mice lemborexant blocked tau from building up in their brains, which markedly reduced the inflammatory brain damage that tau accumulation has been known to cause in Alzheimer’s disease.
He writes in Parhizkar ‘increased inflammatory damage to the brain is related by direct and reciprocal relationship with deleterious growth of aberrant tau’. ‘Inflammation of the brain is a predominant mediator of brain damage seen in neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s’ according to research from our group and others.
Lemborexant thus may be very successful in protecting the brain from these other sources of damage by reducing both aberrant accumulation of tau and inflammatory damage, she said.
Furthermore, animal models that received the sleep aid also showed a 30- to 40% bigger hippocampal capacity than mice without the drug, researchers noted.
“The larger hippocampus volume suggests less brain injury and cell damage in mice with lemborexant than animal control, ” according to Holtzman. “In the latter group aberrant tau protein continued to build up in the brain, which in turn led to cell death and damage (and ultimately to the hippocampal shrinkage that is characteristic of neurodegeneration).
Results in line with earlier studies
Also MNT was able to comment on this work with Gary Small MD – chair of psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center, NJ.
“The results in this new study are based on previous studies that have associated sleeping with better cognitive function, ” Small, who was not involved in the study, said.
“For example, the work of my team found a relationship between sleeping quality and objective measures of sustained attention and an awareness of memory impairment – suggesting that sleeping quality interventions could help improve the complaints of memory and help improve the ability to focus on a particular task, ” he told us.
Other research has shown that getting enough sleeping reduces inflammation and brain amyloid, which might be the reason that sleeping helps improve cognition. Now the Washington University group has given us more evidence of a fundamental link between sleeping apnea and cognitive decline: tau protein build-up, in memory-related areas of the brain, Small added.
