Sleep is detrimental to our mental and physical health. For this reason, doctors recommend a certain amount of sleep depending on your age.
However, a new study has shown that some sleep routines could negatively impact your health. The researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine have concluded that sleeping for too long could result in cognitive decline and cause mental disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.
Researchers titled the study Sleep and Longitudinal Cognitive Performance in Preclinical and Early Symptomatic Alzheimer’s Disease and published it in the Brain Journal.
Experts generally correlate sufficient sleep to benefits, such as improving mental health and reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. In addition, previous researchers have stated that getting enough sleep could be significant in lowering the risk of Alzheimer’s disease since a period of relaxation for your brain can engage the overall functioning of your neurons.
The new study confirms that getting insufficient sleep could cause mental decline. It also shows that oversleeping could have the same result. Oversleeping tends to affect brain functions and affect a person’s thought process.
The study’s goal was to define the precise impacts of sleep on mental health. They used data involving 100 volunteers who were older adults in the 70s. Researchers compared their sleep patterns to their brain health for 4-5 years. They examined the participants by asking them to participate in cognitive and neuropsychological tests. These tests enabled researchers to rule out the chances of the respondents having the condition.
They compiled the results in the Preclinical Alzheimer Cognitive Composite (PACC). A higher PACC score showed that the participant would maintain good cognitive health during the study.
Of the 100 participants, 12 developed cognitive impairment. Among the participants with cognitive decline, 11 were in the pre-dementia stage, while one had developed mild dementia.
The researchers concluded that sleeping over 6.5 hours and less than 4.5 hours increased the risk of cognitive decline. Moreover, they accounted for factors affecting sleep duration like beta-amyloid proteins (a sign of dementia), genetic, and age.