Flushing Your Brain During Sleep and the Link with Alzheimer’s Disease
A new study identifies a link between the movement of cerebrospinal fluid during sleep and the risk of Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s disease
In 1901, German psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer met a patient — a fifty-one-year-old woman — who suffered from progressive memory decline, grew increasingly disoriented, and was occasionally taken by paranoid delusions, including a cheating husband or someone out to kill her.
Alois Alzheimer followed up her case until she died in 1906. His case report, published in 1907 (you can read an English translation of the original here), was the first official description of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Of course, dementia in its many guises has been known for a long time before that, dating back at least to the ancient Greeks.
But the name stuck.
Today roughly fifty million people suffer from dementia, around 60–70% of whom suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. With the global rise in average life expectancy that fifty million— according to some estimates — is set to triple by 2050.
We know that there are genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease, with APOE being a major one. A…
