Poor Sleep Causes Raised Levels of Tau in the Brain

Researchers here suggest a possible explanation for the observed association between disrupted sleep in later life and the development and progression of Alzheimer's disease. Sleep appears necessary to clear out tau produced during waking hours, and loss of sleep means raised levels of tau persist. The more tau in circulation, the more that an altered form of tau will be generated and aggregate into neurofibrillary tangles to damage brain cells. More research would be needed to quantify the size of this effect in comparison to, say, the contributions of lack of exercise or obesity. In the long run, however, one would hope that therapies capable of safely and efficiently clearing neurofibrillary tangles will make the whole question of contributions of this nature entirely irrelevant. Poor sleep has long been linked with Alzheimer's disease, but researchers have understood little about how sleep disruptions drive the disease. Now, studying mice and people, researchers have found that sleep deprivation increases levels of the key Alzheimer's protein tau. And, in follow-up studies in the mice, the research team has shown that sleeplessness accelerates the spread through the brain of toxic clumps of tau ­- a harbinger of brain damage and decisive step along the path to dementia. Tau is normally found in the brain - even in healthy people - but under certain conditions it can clump together into tangles that injure nearby tissue and presage cognitive decline. Recen...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs