THURSDAY, July 6, 2023 (HealthDay News) — Many experts recommend getting a good night’s sleep. For Black Americans who have a genetic variant linked to Alzheimer’s disease, that rest could be protective, a new study says.
This new finding suggests that someone with a high-risk variant may be able to overcome their genetic heritage by improving their sleep habits, said lead author Bernadette Fausto, a research faculty member at Rutgers University-Newark in New York. Jersey.
The results were astounding, he said in a Rutgers news release.
Black Americans are both at higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease and sleep less on average, Fausto said.
Some of the contributors live in cities with denser populations and more nighttime noise and light pollution, which can affect the body’s ability to release the hormone melatonin, Fausto said.
Black individuals are also more likely to have severe cases of sleep apnea, according to a previous study in Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
There is a growing awareness that sleep is critical to brain health and this may contribute significantly to high rates of Alzheimer’s and other dementias among African Americans, said co-author Mark Gluck, director of the Aging & Brain Health Alliance at Rutgers-Newark. Sleep disruption of any kind can accelerate the progression of Alzheimer’s.
Well-established research has found a connection between poor sleep and Alzheimer’s disease. An association with the high-risk ABCA7 gene variant and the disease was also previously discovered, the researchers said in the footnotes.
For this study, researchers explored the interplay between these factors by enrolling 114 cognitively healthy black people from the Newark area.
The researchers divided the participants into two groups: those with the high-risk version of the ABCA7 gene and those with a low-risk variant. All underwent tests related to thinking and (cognitive) memory.
Participants also rated their sleep quality.
The researchers found that people with the risky genotype who reported getting enough sleep were protected from developing an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease. This is the inability to apply, or generalize, previous learning to a new problem.
Those who also had the high-risk genetic variant but who reported poor sleep quality showed impairments in generalizing prior learning.
Sleep is a time when the brain performs basic maintenance tasks, according to the study.
Each cell is like a house: it generates garbage. That only becomes a problem if that trash isn’t picked up, Gluck said in the release.
That garbage is collected during the specific type of sleep that occurs in the pre-dawn hours. When not picked up, toxins can build up in the brain.
We spend about a third of our lives sleeping or trying to sleep, so it’s a pretty significant part of our lives that’s easy to overlook, Fausto said.
“In many areas of medicine we are seeing the growth of what is known as ‘personalised medicine’ in which treatments for a disorder are determined, in part, by a patient’s genetic profile,” Gluck said.
In the future, Gluck added, it could be that a prescription for someone who has the ABCA7 risk factor isn’t medication, but advice: “You really need to improve the quality of your sleep.”
The results of the study were recently published in Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.
More information
The Alzheimers Association has more on Alzheimer’s disease and genetics.
SOURCE: Rutgers University-Newark press release, June 29, 2023
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