The Washington Post speaks to researchers about the link between sleep disorders and Alzheimer’s disease.
“I would say that this another important study showing this link between sleep and subsequent diagnosis of dementia,” Kristine Yaffe, a psychiatry professor at UCSF who heads its Dementia Epidemiology Research Group, said in a telephone interview. She said her study’s findings benefited from having such a large sample of participants: researchers used eight years of records on 200,000 veterans, most of whom were male and 55 or older.
It is well known that people afflicted with Alzheimer’s suffer from sleep disorders, Yaffe said, but further research is necessary to determine whether sleep disturbance heightens the risk of getting dementia or is a symptom.
