Age-related sleep problems de-synchronize brain waves to impair memory

JGeropoulas

The Living Force
I was interested in this because in recent months, I've begun to notice a very slight delay (15 seconds) recalling a particular word I want to write or say. Even though I turn 65 in February, I'm not willing to start attributing every change simply to "aging". This article confirms my greater suspicion that it's due to poor sleep this past year caused by "sinus" congestion.

(Medical side note: After countless trials of various sinus remedies and having 2 ENT sinus specialists insist my sinuses were fine, I've finally determined my congestion actually stems from an infection outside of my sinuses technically--in my tear duct drainage tube into my sinuses, which immediately responded to antibacterial eye drops from my opthalmologist).

Older Adults' Forgetfulness Tied To Faulty Brain Rhythms In Sleep
NPR's Morning Edition
Jon Hamilton
December 18, 2017

Older brains may forget more because they lose their rhythm at night.

During deep sleep, older people have less coordination between two brain waves that are important to saving new memories, a team reports in the journal Neuron.

"It's like a drummer that's perhaps just one beat off the rhythm," says Matt Walker, one of the paper's authors and a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. "The aging brain just doesn't seem to be able to synchronize its brain waves effectively."

The finding appears to answer a long-standing question about how aging can affect memory even in people who do not have Alzheimer's or some other brain disease.

"This is the first paper that actually found a cellular mechanism that might be affected during aging and therefore be responsible for a lack of memory consolidation during sleep," says Julie Seibt, a lecturer in sleep and plasticity at the University of Surrey in the U.K. Seibt was not involved in the new study.

To confirm the finding, though, researchers will have to show that it's possible to cause memory problems in a young brain by disrupting these rhythms, Seibt says.

The study was the result of an effort to understand how the sleeping brain turns short-term memories into memories that can last a lifetime, says Walker, the author of the book Why We Sleep. "What is it about sleep that seems to perform this elegant trick of cementing new facts into the neural architecture of the brain?"

To find out, Walker and a team of scientists had 20 young adults learn 120 pairs of words. "Then we put electrodes on their head and we had them sleep," he says.

The electrodes let researchers monitor the electrical waves produced by the brain during deep sleep. They focused on the interaction between slow waves, which occur every second or so, and faster waves called sleep spindles, which occur more than 12 times a second.

The next morning the volunteers took a test to see how many word pairs they could still remember. And it turned out their performance was determined by how well their slow waves and spindles had synchronized during deep sleep.

"When those two brain waves were perfectly coinciding, that's when you seem to get this fantastic transfer of memory within the brain from short term vulnerable storage sites to these more permanent, safe, long-term storage sites," Walker says.

Next, the team repeated the experiment with 32 people in their 60s and 70s. Their brain waves were less synchronized during deep sleep. They also remembered fewer word pairs the next morning.

And, just like with young people, performance on the memory test was determined by how well their brain waves kept the beat, says Randolph Helfrich, an author of the new study and a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley.

"If you're like 50 milliseconds too early, 50 milliseconds too late, then the storing mechanism actually doesn't work." Helfrich says. [the precision of our brain function is amazing]

The team also found a likely reason for the lack of coordination associated with aging: atrophy of an area of the brain involved in producing deep sleep. People with more atrophy had less rhythm in the brain, Walker says.

That's discouraging because atrophy in this area of the brain is a normal consequence of aging, Walker says, and can be much worse in people with Alzheimer's.

But the study also suggests that it's possible to improve an impaired memory by re-synchronizing brain rhythms during sleep.

One way to do this would be by applying electrical or magnetic pulses through the scalp. "The idea is to boost those brain waves and bring them back together," Helfrich says. [I wonder why boosting the strength of the waves synchronizes them? And if that parallel's the increasing of our knowledge/being increasing our resonance with each other and the Wave of higher frequency energies now upon us?]

Walker already has plans to test this approach to synchronizing brain waves.

"What we're going to try and do is act like a metronome and in doing so see if we can actually salvage aspects of learning and memory in older adults and those with dementia," he says.


https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/12/18/571120472/older-adults-forgetfulness-tied-to-faulty-brain-rhythms-in-sleep
 
Interesting article, thank you for sharing JGeropoulas.

I recently spent more time with my mom during internship at the city she lives in. During that time we had more time to talk and discuss different things, mainly everyday life. She told me that the past year she's had difficulty remembering different things and was getting forgetful about everyday basic stuff. She attributed it to onset of azlheimer due to her age (56) and that she is under heavy stress from multiple different things going on in her life currently. I did not know what to think of it really other than it could be so. Now that I've read what you've shared here, remembering those weeks with her, her sleeping and eating patterns were everywhere. Coming from work around 6-8 pm, eating then sleeps couple of hours, gets up and eats, does chores, back to sleep, gets up between 3-5 am, does chores, goes to work rinse and repeat. She is also vegetarian so now I wonder if that might also have something to do with what she's going through.
 
Eder said:
Interesting article, thank you for sharing JGeropoulas.

I recently spent more time with my mom during internship at the city she lives in. During that time we had more time to talk and discuss different things, mainly everyday life. She told me that the past year she's had difficulty remembering different things and was getting forgetful about everyday basic stuff. She attributed it to onset of azlheimer due to her age (56) and that she is under heavy stress from multiple different things going on in her life currently. I did not know what to think of it really other than it could be so. Now that I've read what you've shared here, remembering those weeks with her, her sleeping and eating patterns were everywhere. Coming from work around 6-8 pm, eating then sleeps couple of hours, gets up and eats, does chores, back to sleep, gets up between 3-5 am, does chores, goes to work rinse and repeat. She is also vegetarian so now I wonder if that might also have something to do with what she's going through.

Imo it might have really something to do with diet, though life and sleep definitely plays also a role in it. And when your brain doesn't get the right food it cannot work properly and can also work badly and eventually get Alzheimer. We have long discussion boards about diet and have a look here:

The Vegetarian Myth
Ketogenic Diet - Powerful Dietary Strategy for Certain Conditions

And the main topic about diet and health:

Diet and health

Of course you need to be careful what to say to your mother since imo any diet can also be a believe system, especially when it comes to a vegetarian diet.

Also two very recent sott focus articles from some Sott health experts:

The health program for Alzheimer's disease that mainstream treatment fails to surpass
Science and Mainstream Media Say Cure for Alzheimer's is Salad. Yes, Salad
 
Gawan said:
Eder said:
Interesting article, thank you for sharing JGeropoulas.

I recently spent more time with my mom during internship at the city she lives in. During that time we had more time to talk and discuss different things, mainly everyday life. She told me that the past year she's had difficulty remembering different things and was getting forgetful about everyday basic stuff. She attributed it to onset of azlheimer due to her age (56) and that she is under heavy stress from multiple different things going on in her life currently. I did not know what to think of it really other than it could be so. Now that I've read what you've shared here, remembering those weeks with her, her sleeping and eating patterns were everywhere. Coming from work around 6-8 pm, eating then sleeps couple of hours, gets up and eats, does chores, back to sleep, gets up between 3-5 am, does chores, goes to work rinse and repeat. She is also vegetarian so now I wonder if that might also have something to do with what she's going through.

Imo it might have really something to do with diet, though life and sleep definitely plays also a role in it. And when your brain doesn't get the right food it cannot work properly and can also work badly and eventually get Alzheimer. We have long discussion boards about diet and have a look here:

The Vegetarian Myth
Ketogenic Diet - Powerful Dietary Strategy for Certain Conditions

And the main topic about diet and health:

Diet and health

Of course you need to be careful what to say to your mother since imo any diet can also be a believe system, especially when it comes to a vegetarian diet.

Also two very recent sott focus articles from some Sott health experts:

The health program for Alzheimer's disease that mainstream treatment fails to surpass
Science and Mainstream Media Say Cure for Alzheimer's is Salad. Yes, Salad

I've suspected the same and noticed being in better shape myself since I started to pay more attention to sleeping patterns as well as paying more attention to what I eat. Been sort of all over the place but making/taking steps to rectify these issues. Thank you for the links, I'll be checking them out!

Spent christmas with family and we did talk about eating habits together at my sisters place. Her son has had some weird aversion to foods that he used to like/eat during last year and she has been baffled about it. Most foods he just vomits/spits out. Calling them yuck! As she shared these things we got to discuss more about diet and eating habits. Talking about these things led to mom telling a story which she has told before. Its odd, she has told it before but I couldn't remember/recall it before she told it again. She had a experience in childhood where she was chased by chickens when going to collect eggs. Also told that her mother used to force her to eat chicken which she detested and later on decided to not eat poultry. She does eat fish and pork though very rarely which led me to believe she is vegetarian. I didn't see her eat any when I was spending time with her, just veggies/carbs/processed vegetarian meals. During christmas meal she did eat some pork and fish.

Really eye-opening now that I think about it. Its easy to forget things and lose awareness. Also thank you for the advice. Have to keep it in mind! :)
 
In nursing homes they're giving old people benzo's and other sleeping pills that deteriorate memory through deletion of deep-sleep promoting delta-waves.
_https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benzodiazepine-use-may-raise-risk-alzheimers-disease-201409107397
 
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