Lack of sleep leading to mental deterioration, even Alzheimers

[Alta Morden]

I read this article recently:

http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/04/03/sleep...

The big take-away for me was this:

Previous research, published in the journal Science,⁸ has also revealed your brain removes toxic waste during sleep through what has been dubbed "the glymphatic system."^{9, 10, 11, 12, 13} This system ramps up its activity during sleep, thereby allowing your brain to clear out toxins, including harmful proteins linked to brain disorders such as Alzheimer's.

By pumping cerebral spinal fluid through your brain's tissues, the glymphatic system flushes the waste, from your brain, back into your body's circulatory system. From there, the waste eventually reaches your liver, where it's ultimately eliminated. So it's quite likely that sleep affects your brain function and your risk of degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's in more ways than one.

I can't be the only one with MDD who has deeply disturbed sleep because the daydreams don't shut off just because we want/ need to sleep.  This scared me quite a bit.

Thoughts?

[Alvi]

I've actually looked into this before as I read an article that daydreaming is linked to alzheimer's (whatever you do don't google it!).

I think the thing you've got to remember is that they do not know for certain what causes dementia. 

Things Alzheimer's has been linked to include, Diet, Diabetes, Epilepsy, Snoring and sleep position, Drinking, Algae, Stress and Depression, Genetics, Inflammatory problems. They're now even saying it can be passed on person to person.

There are so many different theories that I doubt there is one clear cause per person. As someone with a terrible memory and having a number of high risk factors I actually worry about this disease a lot. 

I would try not to let one newspaper report make you lose sleep (no pun intended). You'll do more harm to your health from worrying about this than the actual daydreaming. 

[Alta Morden]

Thanks for your reply, excellent points.  By now I should know better than to self diagnose on the internet. <wry smile>

[Alta Morden]

Just to add:  Algae??  wow, in short pretty well everything.