I was at lunch yesterday with my wife Janice and she asked me if I'd seen the
research that came out this month regarding daytime sleepiness and it's
linked to Alzheimer's I told her I hadn't. she got it from her alumni her Hopkins
alumni magazine they were bragging (again) about what their Doc's what their
researchers are doing. this is the title of (or this is the the cover article) and
I believe these are probably PET scans from the study these are Pittsburgh
contrast PET scans you can pick up amyloid beta in these so the idea was or
adults who are excessively tired during the day are more likely to
have the brain deposits linked to Alzheimer's now who did this study how
good was it how many people were involved a couple of things about it
number one it was in sleep magazine the peer-reviewed journal of
the Sleep Research Society it was by Adam Spira he's a PhD researcher in
sleep at Hopkins and he did this with a team there here's the title excessive
daytime sleepiness and napping and cognitively normal adults associations
with subsequent amyloid deposition measured by Pibb PET scan again Pibb is
the type of pip PET scans are a way of picking up amyloid beta so again how
many people did they look at is this a retrospective or an environmental study
or a prospective study actually as a prospective study I'll talk about some
of these issues in just a minute but first a brief introduction my name is
Ford Brewer I started off as an ER
a little bit over 30 years ago working in the ER as a doc you get a focus on
prevention because most of the things people bring in to the ER and in terms
of death disease and disability are preventable we just need to focus and
have the discipline that make some of the lifestyle changes and health
behavior changes that we need to make but in order to do that we need to
understand that the background and the science I've been I went to Hopkins
I left the ER after just a couple of years and ... got training
and prevention loved it ended up running the program and have worked for the
30-something year since then. I've been a career medical director working
with primary care staffs as large as 800 Doc's and more helping them understand
prevention so they can prevent disease rather than just treat after it
happens I've seen my share of patients and worked with patients on doing the
same thing as well this channel is a free access to some of the
information that's coming out the science that's developing so well back
to dr. Adams Spira's study on excessive daytime sleepiness
he studied 124 community dwelling participants at the Baltimore
longitudinal study of Aging they have a neuroimaging sub study and this was
folks that they're following long term so it was a prospective study they
looked at 124 people who completed itself with self-reported measures of
EDS excessive daytime sleepiness
study baseline they had normal cognitive performance at that time there underwent
Pittsburgh compound be positron emission tomography that's Pitts Pib PET.
what it's called PET scans of the brain and those show beta amyloid they looked
at those and again an average of 16 years later what were the results
well the participants in terms of results were on average about 60 years
old some as young as 36 and others as old as 82 at the baseline when they
started it and so then you add the average 16 years to that 24 percent had
excessive daytime sleepiness and 29 percent napped in an unadjusted analysis
they were these they were those with EDS exists of daytime sleepiness were more
than three times likely to have significant beta amyloid buildup at
follow-up more than three times they did some adjustments regarding age BMI
education and it was still it decreased some but it was still almost three times
so his conclusion the author's conclusion was that excessive daytime
sleepiness is associated with almost three times the odds of amyloid
beta deposition on average 16 years later if common EDS causes like sleep
disorder breathing and insufficient sleep are associated with
temporally (time- associated)with Alzheimer's biomarkers this could have important
implications for prevention well in fact he went on to say that yes folks
understand that exercise and ...both physical and mental exercise our major
preventive for Alzheimer's he also went on the comment that there is no
treatment as I think we all know there's no treatment that's effective right now
for Alzheimer's Brett at Dale Bredesen is pushing on it . we've been doing some
work at PrevMed on it but again there's no pill it's all lifestyle
lifestyle diet supplementation health behaviors so his point was people
haven't totally recognized sleep as a preventative measure and this is really
going to help get us there well I agree what do I
think what's my bottom line I agree and I disagree
I certainly agree with his point that sleep is important I don't know that I
agree though with his statement that that's not recognized look at this I
mean if you could just google the term Google Scholar which will help you find
academic or science articles and daytime sleepiness Alzheimer's within less than
a second you get thirty seven thousand six hundred results now I didn't go
through all of those results but I went through a few pages of them and as you
can see here there's a huge well-known Association of sleeplessness and
Alzheimer's so I don't know how important it is in terms of moving the
science forward but I will say this if you're like Adam Spira and you're
still not totally there in terms of believing the linkage between sleep and
prevention of dementia I would think again and I would make sure that I dealt
with whatever problems I have regarding sleep whether it's lack of exercise
sleep disordered breathing things like that thank you for your attention