With the complications and heartache that come with Alzheimer's for both patients and loved ones, early detection for this disease is crucial in helping to slow down its progression. This week, a new report from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis showed that sleep disruptions may be among the earliest signs of Alzheimer's disease.
The report, published in Science Translational Medicine, explains that when the first signs of Alzheimer's plaques appeared in mice models' brains, the normal sleep-wake system was significantly disrupted.
“If sleep abnormalities begin this early in the course of human Alzheimer’s disease, those changes could provide us with an easily detectable sign of pathology,” said senior author David M. Holtzman, MD, the Andrew B. and Gretchen P. Jones Professor and head of Washington University’s Department of Neurology, in a press release. “As we start to treat Alzheimer’s patients before the onset of dementia, the presence or absence of sleep problems may be a rapid indicator of whether the new treatments are succeeding.”
To confirm that amyloid beta, a component in Alzheimer's plaques, was directly linked to the changes in sleep, researchers gave a vaccine against it to a new group of mice with the same genetic modifications. As these mice grew older, they did not develop brain plaques. Their sleeping patterns remained normal and amyloid beta levels in the brain continued to rise and fall regularly.
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