Credit: Yo-El Ju
Research from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Radboud University Medical Centre in the Netherlands, and Stanford University shows that disrupting just one night of sleep in healthy, middle-aged adults causes an increase in a brain protein associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Further, a week of poor sleep leads to an increase in another brain protein that has been linked to brain damage in Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases. Shown are brain waves during slow-wave sleep, measured as a study participant slept.