New Study Links Napping To Increased Risk Of Alzheimer’s.

You know those napping pods tech companies like Google and Meta like to champion as perks for their employees?  They could be dangerous. 

An article published in Alzheimer’s Dementia claims that there could be a link between cognitive decline and excessive daytime napping. 

Here’s what researchers say; longer and more frequent napping were correlated with worse cognition after a year of study, according to a story in Neuroscience News. If there were longer and more frequent napping, then the cognition was even worse. 

Aron Buchman is a neurologist at Rush University Medical Center.  He was one of the study’s authors, and he said his reward helped refute the previously held fact that Alzheimer’s disease was a purely cognitive disorder. 

Here’s a white he gave to neurosciencenews.com.

“We now know that the pathology related to cognitive decline can cause other changes in function. It’s really a multi-system disorder, also including difficulty sleeping, changes in movement, changes in body composition, depression symptoms, behavioral changes, etc.”

Researchers followed one thousand four hundred patients for up to 14 years in this Rush Memory and Aging Project. The people taking part in the study wore wrist sensors that recorded activity continuously for up to 10 days.  These test patients then came in for examinations and cognitive testing once per year. Any prolonged period of no activity during the day from 9 a.m. up to 7 p.m. was considered a nap by researchers. 

At the start of the study, over 75% of those in the study showed no signs of cognitive impairment, and just under 20% had mild impairments, while 4% had Alzheimer’s disease dementia. As the study progressed and nap times increased for participants, researchers found that older folks who napped more than an hour per day had a 40% higher risk of getting Alzheimer’s. 

Here’s another quote from Buchman in neurosciencenews.com. 

“This is an observational study, so we can’t say that ‘a causes b’, but we can say that they unfold at the same time, and it’s possible that the same pathologies may contribute to both.”

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