To make up for a sleepless night and stay awake until it’s time to sleep, doctors usually recommend taking a ‘nap’ in the middle of the day, that is, taking a short nap during the day to conserve energy. However, it seems that these shortcuts do not bode well for older individuals.
Research on how napping affects cognition in adults has mixed results. Some studies of younger adults suggest that naps are beneficial for cognition, while studies of older adults suggest it may be linked to cognitive impairment. According to some results, napping during the day may be an early sign of dementia for the elderly.
Excessive daytime sleepiness may be an early harbinger of cognitive decline
Sleep disturbance, known symptoms of mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia in older adults, and daytime naps often become more extreme as the disease progresses. As a result, patients are less likely to fall asleep, and are more likely to wake up at night and feel sleepy during the day.
Yue Leng, an epidemiologist studying sleep and neurodegeneration in older adults, and her team teamed up with 1,401 adults, aged 81, to find out whether changes in nap habits precipitate other signs of cognitive decline and to understand the link between daytime sleepiness and dementia. studied a group. In the examinations, it was determined that nap time increased in direct proportion with increasing age, and excessive sleep during the day could be a precursor of cognitive decline.
At the beginning of the study, in which the prolonged immobility of participants who wore a watch-like device that tracked their movements for 14 years was interpreted as a shortcut, approximately 75 percent of the participants had no cognitive impairment. Of the remaining participants, 4 percent had Alzheimer’s and 20 percent had mild cognitive impairment, a frequent precursor to dementia.
While the amount of napping per day among all participants gradually increased throughout the years that the study continued, it was noteworthy that until the end of the study, there were some differences between the nap habits of the participants with Alzheimer’s disease and those who did not. Accordingly, participants who did not develop cognitive impairment had an average of 11 extra minutes of nap time per year, while this rate doubled to 25 extra minutes per year after a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment; After the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, it tripled to 68 extra minutes per year.
In conclusion, it was concluded that older adults who took at least one or more naps a day had a 40 percent higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s than those who did not take a nap every day or took less than an hour a day. Even when factors such as daily activities, diseases and medications were examined, there was no change in the findings obtained.
The number of neurons that support wakefulness is lower in the brain of Alzheimer’s patients
On the other hand, a University of California study found that longer naps only reduce aging up to a certain point. It reveals that this is a normal part of life and offers a potential mechanism for explaining why people with dementia take more frequent and longer naps.
Comparing the postmortem brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease with the brains of people without cognitive impairment, it was found that Alzheimer’s patients have fewer neurons that support wakefulness in three regions of their brains. These neuronal changes turned out to be linked to tau proteins, a hallmark of Alzheimer’s, where the protein that helps stabilize healthy neurons forms clumps that inhibit communication between neurons.
This means that although the study does not provide conclusive evidence that increased daytime sleepiness causes cognitive decline, it does indicate that long-term naps are a potential signal for accelerated aging. More research is needed to determine whether tracking daytime sleep can help detect cognitive decline.
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