A quality sleep is essential for our physical and psychological well-being and numerous scientific evidence confirms this, and although science has not yet discovered why we need to sleep, we do know that not doing so is incompatible with life, and as proof of this there is a rare disease called fatal familial insomnia in which those affected suffer progressive and incurable insomnia and end up dying from this cause.
More than a century after Freud tried to decipher the meaning of dreams, we still do not know it, however, it seems that what we dream does have relevance for our health, since a new study has discovered that middle-aged people who have frequent nightmares are more likely to develop cognitive impairment or be diagnosed with dementia later on.
The research has been carried out by scientists at the University of Birmingham and has been published in The Lancet journal, eClinicalMedicine, and its results suggest that nightmares can become frequent years, or even decades, before memory problems manifest themselves and thought to be characteristic dementia symptoms.
Bad dreams an early indicator of dementia risk
Dr Abidemi Otaiku, from the Center for Human Brain Health at the University of Birmingham, said: “We have shown for the first time that distressing dreams or nightmares may be linked to the risk of dementia and cognitive decline among adults. healthy in the general population.
“Bad dreams could be a useful way to identify people at high risk of developing dementia and establish strategies to delay the onset of the disease”
“This is important because there are very few risk indicators for dementia that can be identified as early as middle age. While more work is needed to confirm these links, we believe that bad dreams could be a useful way to identify people at high risk of developing dementia and establish strategies to delay the onset of the disease.”
The researchers analyzed data from more than 600 adult men and women ages 35 to 64, and 2,600 adults ages 79 and older, living in the United States. None of them had dementia at the beginning of the study and the youngest group was followed for an average of nine years and five years in the case of the oldest. The data began to be collected between 2002 and 2012 and the participants answered different questionnaires, including the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, which contains a question about how often people have nightmares.
The data was then re-analyzed using statistical software to see if participants who had nightmares more frequently were more likely to experience cognitive decline and be diagnosed with dementia. The results showed that middle-aged people (35-64) who have nightmares every week are four times more likely to develop cognitive decline over the next decade, while older people are twice as likely to be diagnosed with dementia.
The researchers were surprised to find that the associations were much stronger for men than for women. For example, older men who experienced nightmares weekly were five times more likely to develop dementia than their peers who reported no nightmares. In contrast, in women, the increased risk was only 41%.
Among the researchers’ new goals is to investigate whether nightmares in young individuals might be associated with future dementia risk, and whether other characteristics of dreams, such as how often we remember them or how vivid they are, may also help. to identify the risk of dementia. In addition, they intend to study the biological basis of bad dreams, both in healthy people and in people with dementia, using electroencephalograms (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
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