Gary Brecka

This is the exact same protein that forms the plaques found in Alzheimer's disease.

It should come as no surprise that when you don't get enough sleep, you won't clear this waste out as well as you should.

In fact, researchers have shown that just one night of sleep deprivation increases beta amyloid levels in the brain.

one night.

And now that they have demonstrated the biological mechanism, the evidence is becoming more and more concrete that poor sleep habits over time are a cause of these chronic diseases later in life.

Now let's talk about one of the biggest, longest, and most important sleep studies ever conducted.

This was published in the high impact journal Nature in 2021, and it followed nearly 8,000 people for 25 years.

That is a ton of data collected on tracking real people's real sleep patterns and then their health outcomes.

These researchers wanted to find out if how much you sleep earlier in life can predict whether you'll develop dementia later.

They measured sleep duration at age 50, and then again at age 60, and again at age 70.

They tracked who developed dementia over the following decades.

Here's what they found.

People who consistently slept six hours or less per night during their 50s had a 30% higher risk of developing dementia compared to those who slept at least seven hours.

And this wasn't explained by depression, cardiovascular disease, or other health factors.

It was entirely attributed to sleep.

This study is super important because they also track people who change their sleep duration over time.

People who went from normal sleep hours, let's say seven hours, to short sleep, six hours or less, also showed even higher risk for dementia.

This shows us that these chronic diseases aren't just attributed to having bad genes.

Cutting your sleep short in midlife directly increased your risk decades later.

Think about the timeline here.