Dementia: The Quality of Your Night’s Sleep Can Affect Symptoms the Next Day – New Research

Dementia: The Quality of Your Night’s Sleep Can Affect Symptoms the Next Day – New Research
MRI brain of a dementia patient with left parietal atrophy asymmetry. Atthapon Raksthaput/Shutterstock
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We’ve probably all experienced how a poor night’s sleep can make us feel tired, irritable and have difficulty concentrating the next day. But while the odd night of poor sleep has no impact on our health, research shows that prolonged sleep disturbances predict cognitive decline – and are also a risk factor for dementia. Disrupted sleep is also known to be a symptom of Alzheimer’s disease, a type of dementia.

But while we know that poor sleep is connected to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease on a long-term scale, until now it was unknown to what extent night-to-night variation of sleep affects dementia symptoms in the short term (such as the following day). This is something we tried to answer in our recently published study.

Professor of Sleep and Physiology and Director of Surrey Sleep Research Centre, University of Surrey
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