Shift workers sleeping at erratic hours. Students pulling all-nighters. Menopausal women tossing and turning in bed from hot flashes.
There are a host of reasons why people have periods of poor sleep. And anyone who’s endured back-to-back nights of sub-par slumber likely knows the result: Feelings of brain fog, grogginess, or even memory issues.
In the short-term, those cognitive hiccups are usually manageable. Take, for instance, new parents, said John Peever, a sleep scientist affiliated with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. “It can be a couple of years of pretty serious sleep loss, and they still push through,” he said. “But whether or not they could sustain that over many years, I think the answer to that question would be ‘no.'”
A growing body of research points to clear links between deep sleep and memory formation, and on the flip side, the possibility of dire consequences when someone’s sleep quality erodes over time.
A new paper published in JAMA Neurology found just a one per cent reduction in deep sleep each year in individuals aged 60 and up was associated with a significantly higher risk of developing dementia.
The scientists looked at roughly 350 participants enrolled in the Framingham Heart Study — a long-term, multigenerational American research project — who completed two overnight sleep studies as part of the research.
During nearly two decades of follow-up, the team identified 52 cases of dementia among the participants. The researchers adjusted for other factors such as age, sex, and sleeping medication use, and still found each percentage decrease in deep sleep per year was linked to a 27 per cent higher dementia risk.
That data couldn’t say whether the sleep decline caused the dementia — or which came first — but we do know sleep matters for our mental functioning.
“Good sleep seems to be involved in so many things that are important for a healthy and well-functioning brain,” noted lead researcher Matthew Pase, a sleep scientist from the Monash School of Psychological Sciences and the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health in Melbourne, Australia.
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Featured VideoBack in 2005, Canadians averaged about eight hours of sleep a night. By 2013, that dropped to seven. Now about 40 per cent of Canadians are dealing with some kind of sleep disorder. Something about sleep keeps our bodies and minds from falling apart. The lack of it has been linked to obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and depression. Researchers are now discovering some fascinating things about how important sleep is to the way our brains store memories and learn things.
Research suggests poor sleep impacts cognition
The link between sleep and memory is a thread scientists have tugged on for centuries.
As far back as the mid-1700s, English philosopher David Hartley speculated that dream-filled sleep could be tied to the formation of memories inside the human brain. By the 1900s, modern researchers began to prove him right, showing how distinct sleep stages impact the process of memory development.
“Evidence now suggests that sleep is important in the processing of newly acquired information and for the long-term storage of memory,” neuroscientist and sleep researcher Matthew Walker wrote in 2009.
That evidence includes research from the last two decades suggesting just a day and a half without sleep is enough to disrupt someone’s ability to play a basic memory game, or slow down their reaction times. Another study involving American nurses found people who both under- or overslept — either five hours or less a night, or nine hours or more — showed worse performance on cognitive tests. The researchers estimated those groups were mentally two years older than their counterparts getting seven or eight hours of sleep each night.
Though sleep happens for most of us every night, it’s not easy or cheap to study and can involve participants sleeping at the lab. Here, a sleep study subject undergoes an MRI in December 2019 at the Royal Ottawa Institute for Mental Health Research . (Diane Grant/CBC)
Some research even suggests sleep deprivation mimics the feeling of being drunk, with one Australian research team likening a single day of sleep deprivation with the mental impairment of a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10 per cent.
Yet the conversation around what constitutes a good night’s sleep — and how sleep impacts memory loss and formation — continues to shift.
While most people still get hung up on the total hours of shut-eye, modern sleep scientists say there’s growing consensus that the quality of your sleep matters even more.
Impact of ‘slow-wave sleep’
Whether you typically sleep for six hours a night, or need nine hours of shut-eye, everyone’s body goes through a cycle of sleep stages. Once you doze off, your body enters a light sleep, which usually only lasts a few minutes. Then your heart rate and body temperature drop as you head into deeper sleep.
Eventually, you hit the restorative period that scientists call “slow-wave sleep.”
That’s the specific sleep stage Pase’s team studied, in which people fall into the deepest slumber. It’s also thought to be a period when the brain repairs itself.
Dr. Brian Murray, a professor of neurology at the University of Toronto and head of the neurology division at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, said it’s a bit like rebooting a computer, giving it a chance to clear out stray signals. In the case of the human brain, that can mean removing “misfolded protein garbage” that builds up during waking hours. “This is critically important for neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s [and] Parkinson’s,” he said.
The connection between good quality sleep and that junk removal process has only recently been identified, added Murray.
Neurologist Brian Murray runs a sleep lab at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. He says sleep helps improve cognitive function and helps clear junk out of the brain. (Craig Chivers/CBC News)
The latest findings from Pase and his team build on that, suggesting slow-wave sleep loss may be a dementia risk factor that people can actually try to mitigate. But Pase stressed his research doesn’t prove getting less slow-wave sleep can cause dementia.
Aging and memory loss also go hand-in-hand with comorbidities — which can disrupt sleep — and might result in someone living long-term in environments that aren’t conducive to quality slumber, like brightly-lit hospitals or care homes, he noted.
“The question becomes: Is altered sleep the side effect of dementia itself? Or is altered sleep facilitating dementia?” echoed Peever, the Canadian sleep scientist. “So, a ‘chicken and the egg’ story that is always almost impossible to unravel.”
Still, Peever said the paper offers another piece of the evolving puzzle. “What they’ve shown is, if you take all patients across time — those with dementia, and those without incident dementia — there is a decline in how much slow-wave sleep they experience,” he said. “But the decline in dementia patients was significantly greater.”
Dr. Eric Zhou, an assistant professor in the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, agreed the study was rigorous and compelling. The findings also fit into broader research linking poor sleep quality to an array of health issues, from stroke to cancer to mental health conditions.
“You name the health problem,” Zhou said, “and chronically not getting enough sleep — or chronically not sleeping well — will accelerate your risk of developing it, or exacerbate the condition if you have it already.”
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Challenges of studying sleep
Yet researching sleep, and showing clear cause-and-effect on various health issues, remains a distinct challenge. Sleep studies are notoriously difficult to run, time-consuming, and often prohibitively expensive, Zhou noted. Ethically, scientists can’t randomly assign healthy adults to “getting really miserable sleep,” he said. Sleep studies also require a cumbersome step for participants: Staying in a lab overnight.
“It’s not a blood draw,” Zhou continued. “It’s not one check of their pulse.”
To really figure out the impacts of sleep on long-term memory loss, scientists also need a massive pool of people, and it’s almost impossible to gain funding to do complex sleep studies at a population level, Zhou said. Even decades-worth of data from hundreds of participants only gave Pase’s research team 52 dementia cases to analyze, he noted.
Pase himself agreed, and said the dual nature of his research presented an additional challenge. “The thing about dementia is, although it’s common in a population, everyone’s chance of getting it at any given time is kind of low. So, it’s a difficult thing to study.”
The bottom line is that emerging research linking sleep and memory loss may be persuasive, but it’s not conclusive, Peever stressed. It’s worth striving for better sleep, he added, but there’s also no reason to panic: The vast majority of the population experiences a deterioration in sleep quality over time, for reasons scientists don’t fully understand.
“So clearly, sleep quality — as it declines with age — is not causing dementia in everybody.”
MILWAUKEE (AP) — Whooping cough is at its highest level in a decade for this time of year, U.S. health officials reported Thursday.
There have been 18,506 cases of whooping cough reported so far, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s the most at this point in the year since 2014, when cases topped 21,800.
The increase is not unexpected — whooping cough peaks every three to five years, health experts said. And the numbers indicate a return to levels before the coronavirus pandemic, when whooping cough and other contagious illnesses plummeted.
Still, the tally has some state health officials concerned, including those in Wisconsin, where there have been about 1,000 cases so far this year, compared to a total of 51 last year.
Nationwide, CDC has reported that kindergarten vaccination rates dipped last year and vaccine exemptions are at an all-time high. Thursday, it released state figures, showing that about 86% of kindergartners in Wisconsin got the whooping cough vaccine, compared to more than 92% nationally.
Whooping cough, also called pertussis, usually starts out like a cold, with a runny nose and other common symptoms, before turning into a prolonged cough. It is treated with antibiotics. Whooping cough used to be very common until a vaccine was introduced in the 1950s, which is now part of routine childhood vaccinations. It is in a shot along with tetanus and diphtheria vaccines. The combo shot is recommended for adults every 10 years.
“They used to call it the 100-day cough because it literally lasts for 100 days,” said Joyce Knestrick, a family nurse practitioner in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Whooping cough is usually seen mostly in infants and young children, who can develop serious complications. That’s why the vaccine is recommended during pregnancy, to pass along protection to the newborn, and for those who spend a lot of time with infants.
But public health workers say outbreaks this year are hitting older kids and teens. In Pennsylvania, most outbreaks have been in middle school, high school and college settings, an official said. Nearly all the cases in Douglas County, Nebraska, are schoolkids and teens, said Justin Frederick, deputy director of the health department.
That includes his own teenage daughter.
“It’s a horrible disease. She still wakes up — after being treated with her antibiotics — in a panic because she’s coughing so much she can’t breathe,” he said.
It’s important to get tested and treated with antibiotics early, said Dr. Kris Bryant, who specializes in pediatric infectious diseases at Norton Children’s in Louisville, Kentucky. People exposed to the bacteria can also take antibiotics to stop the spread.
“Pertussis is worth preventing,” Bryant said. “The good news is that we have safe and effective vaccines.”
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AP data journalist Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
How a sperm and egg fuse together has long been a mystery.
New research by scientists in Austria provides tantalizing clues, showing fertilization works like a lock and key across the animal kingdom, from fish to people.
“We discovered this mechanism that’s really fundamental across all vertebrates as far as we can tell,” said co-author Andrea Pauli at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.
The team found that three proteins on the sperm join to form a sort of key that unlocks the egg, allowing the sperm to attach. Their findings, drawn from studies in zebrafish, mice, and human cells, show how this process has persisted over millions of years of evolution. Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell.
Scientists had previously known about two proteins, one on the surface of the sperm and another on the egg’s membrane. Working with international collaborators, Pauli’s lab used Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence tool AlphaFold — whose developers were awarded a Nobel Prize earlier this month — to help them identify a new protein that allows the first molecular connection between sperm and egg. They also demonstrated how it functions in living things.
It wasn’t previously known how the proteins “worked together as a team in order to allow sperm and egg to recognize each other,” Pauli said.
Scientists still don’t know how the sperm actually gets inside the egg after it attaches and hope to delve into that next.
Eventually, Pauli said, such work could help other scientists understand infertility better or develop new birth control methods.
The work provides targets for the development of male contraceptives in particular, said David Greenstein, a genetics and cell biology expert at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the study.
The latest study “also underscores the importance of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry,” he said in an email.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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