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There’s evidence in people and animals that short-term sleep deprivation can change the levels of amyloid-β, a peptide that can accumulate in the aging brain and cause Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists now show long-term consequences may also result from sustained poor sleep. In a study published September 3 in Current Biology, researchers found that healthy individuals with lower-quality sleep were more likely to have amyloid-β accumulation in the brain years later. The study could not say whether poor sleep caused amyloid-β accumulation or vice versa, but the authors say that sleep could be an indicator of present and future amyloid-β levels.
“Traditionally, sleep disruptions have been accepted as a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease,” says Ksenia Kastanenka, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved in the work. Her group showed in 2017 that improving sleep in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, in which the animals’ ...
