More Sleep Can Repair Dementia Caused by Alzheimer's

Memory loss in people with dementia caused by Alzheimer's and other conditions could be improved with additional sleep, a new study claims.

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis disabled memory-making genes in fruit flies and later restored the ability to make memories by increasing sleep quantity. Researchers believe the study holds relevance for humans as fruit flies regulate sleep the same way humans do.

"Our data showed that extra sleep can handle any of these problems. It has to be the right kind of sleep, and we're not sure how to induce this kind of slumber in the human brain yet, but our research suggests that if we can learn how, it could have significant therapeutic potential," said senior author Paul Shaw.

Researchers used three groups of fruit flies and disabled different genes in each group to mimic conditions that are seen in humans. In one group, researchers disabled a key gene that brought on dementia akin to memory loss caused by Alzheimer's disease. In the second group, gene disabling caused too many connections in the brain that affected memory while the third group of flies had problems making connections to encode memory.

Researchers then got the flies to sleep longer, equivalent to 3 to 4 hours for humans per day, over two days. They found that the ability to make memories was restored. Sleep was induced in three different ways.

"In all of these flies, the lost or disabled gene still does not work properly. Sleep can't bring that missing gene back, but it finds ways to work around the physiological problem," said lead author Stephane Dissel.