The quest for rest: Sleep could be the key to fighting Alzheimer’s—and a huge business opportunity – By David H. Freeman (Fortune) / July 31 2021
Last year Miranda Lim found that taking care of three young children homebound by the pandemic meant she often had to work late into the evening to stay on top of her job. Concerned that the extended hours were taking a toll on her sleep, Lim started tracking her sleep time with an app on her iPhone. She wasn’t quite prepared for the results. “I saw my bedtime was bouncing anywhere between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m.,” she says. “I was just horrified.” As a result, she immediately set up a daily alarm—not for waking up, but for heading off to bed at a reasonable hour.
It’s understandable why Lim would be a bit of an alarmist, so to speak, when threatened with a lack of a consistent night’s sleep. A neurologist at the Oregon Health & Science University and a sleep disorders physician at the VA Portland Health Care System, Lim is at the forefront of a global cadre of medical researchers who have in recent years been pinning down the ways in which even moderate sleep deficiencies in middle age strongly link to Alzheimer’s disease and dementia later in life. “We used to think that sleep problems were just another symptom of Alzheimer’s,” she says. “Our big discovery was that the lack of sleep involves brain processes that may develop into the disease.”
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