Daytime sleepiness can indicate senile dementia

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Regular daytime sleepiness may be a sign of impending dementia. This is the conclusion reached by scientists from Harvard University.

Many people like to sleep well not only at night, but also during the day. However, this habit can be a warning sign of dementia in the elderly. The authors of the study discovered what they call a closed loop between senile dementia and daytime sleepiness. This conclusion was reached after observing hundreds of people over the age of 80 for a decade.

The results showed that those elderly people who slept during the day at least once a day were 40% more likely to later develop Alzheimer's disease – the most common type of dementia. The duration of daytime sleep was also important. If the elderly spent more than an hour on daytime sleep every day, the risk was maximum. The study also showed that as people began to develop dementia, daytime sleep became longer.

At the same time, concrete evidence that daytime sleepiness somehow causes pathological processes in the brain has not yet been obtained. It is quite possible that this is not a cause, but a consequence or a signal of acceleration of brain aging processes and deterioration of cognitive activity. Scientists believe that the toxic proteins that accumulate in the brain, which give rise to Alzheimer's disease, affect the areas of the brain that allow us to stay awake.