How we sleep today may forecast when Alzheimer’s disease begins

Alzheimer's disease
Diagram of the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s Disease. Credit: Wikipedia/public domain.

What would you do if you knew how long you had until Alzheimer’s disease set in? Don’t despair. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests one defense against this virulent form of dementia—for which no treatment currently exists—is deep, restorative sleep, and plenty of it.

UC Berkeley neuroscientists Matthew Walker and Joseph Winer have found a way to estimate, with some degree of accuracy, a time frame for when Alzheimer’s is most likely to strike in a person’s lifetime.

“We have found that the sleep you’re having right now is almost like a…

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