A Lack of Sleep in Middle Age Can Increase the Risk of Dementia

• Researchers say getting adequate sleep in your 50s and 60s can lower your risk for dementia later in life.
• In their study, researchers reported that people who got 6 hours or less sleep per night were 30 percent more likely to develop dementia.
• Experts say the final hours of sleep are crucial — that’s when the brain goes through a cleaning-up process.

Go ahead, get that extra hour of sleep. Your brain may thank you later.

New research suggests that people not getting enough sleep in their 50s and 60s may be increasing their chances of developing dementia later in life.

The study, published last week in the journal Nature Communications, followed nearly 8,000 people in Great Britain for about 25 years, beginning when they were about 50 years old.

The subjects who reported averaging 6 hours or less sleep a night were 30 percent more likely to develop dementia than those who regularly averaged 7 hours or more of sleep per night.

Doctors say that even an extra hour of sleep can make a difference when it comes to the brain getting its necessary internal work done.

“We’ve discovered that sleep and memory consolidation are related,” Dr. Abhinav Singh, the facility director of the Indiana Sleep Center, told Healthline. “It is during different sleep stages and their cycling that new memories and information are processed, the excess and negative memories are removed, and the archiving of contextual memories take place.

“Emotional memory processing also takes place during our sleep cycles,” Singh said. “The last two hours of sleep are rich with REM sleep, and more evidence is coming that this is an important phase of sleep that helps us with memory consolidation and emotional memory. And if you deprive yourself of these last two hours, you are going to impair that process.”