10/11/2023 0 Comments Lack of deep sleep stage![]() If Rooney and Iliff are right, the experiment will greatly strengthen the argument that a lack of sleep can lead to Alzheimer's disease. "But we'll make people as comfortable as possible, and we'll just follow them as they go through these natural stages of sleep." "It's a tricky thing because it's a small space," Rooney says. One challenge, though, will be finding people able to fall asleep in the cramped and noisy tunnel of the magnetic resonance machine. They hope to begin scanning the brains of participants within a year. Rooney and Iliff have received funding from the Paul G. In the brains of older people, and those who are likely to develop Alzheimer's, the signal should be weaker. In young, healthy brains, the signal should be "robust," Rooney says, indicating that the toxin removal system is working well. That would indicate that fluid has begun moving freely through the brain. When humans enter deep sleep, and toxin removal begins, there should be a particular change in the signal coming from certain salt molecules. The MRI unit is so sensitive, it should be able to detect changes that indicate precisely when the glymphatic system gets switched on in a person's brain, says Bill Rooney, who directs the university's Advanced Imaging Research Center. The solution may involve one of the world's most powerful magnetic resonance imaging machines, which sits in a basement at OHSU. With people, "we have to find a way to see the same sort of function, but in a way that is going to be reasonably noninvasive and safe," he says. The system also involved a powerful laser and state-of-the-art microscope. Iliff studied the glymphatic system in living mice by looking through a window created in the skull. To know for sure, though, researchers will have to study this cleansing process in people, which won't be easy. He'll work with Bill Rooney, director of the university's Advanced Imaging Research Center, to enroll people in a similar study in 2016.Ĭourtesy of Oregon Health & Science University Jeffrey Iliff (left), a brain scientist at Oregon Health & Science University, has been studying toxin removal in the brains of mice. "That suggests at least one possible way that disruption in sleep may predispose toward Alzheimer's disease," he says. ![]() This process, via what's known as the glymphatic system, allows the brain to clear out toxins, including the toxins that form Alzheimer's plaques, Iliff says. What happens, Iliff says, is "the fluid that's normally on the outside of the brain, cerebrospinal fluid - it's a clean, clear fluid - it actually begins to recirculate back into and through the brain along the outsides of blood vessels." Then, in 2013, Iliff was a member of a team that discovered how a lack of sleep could be speeding the development of those Alzheimer's plaques: A remarkable cleansing process takes place in the brain during deep sleep, at least in animals. Louis showed that the sticky amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's develop more quickly in the brains of sleep-deprived mice. ![]() The first finding emerged in 2009, when researchers at Washington University in St. But two recent discoveries have suggested the relationship may be more complicated. Sleep disorders are very common among people with Alzheimer's disease.įor a long time, researchers thought this was simply because the disease was "taking out the centers of the brain that are responsible for regulating sleep," Iliff says. It has been clear for decades that there is some sort of link.
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