Feeling sleepy during daytime can heighten risk of THIS mental disability

Feeling sleepy during the daytime despite getting sufficient downtime at night is becoming quite common. However, there might be a dangerous aspect to it, doctors have warned. According to experts, people who feel sleepy during the day could be slowly developing dementia, Daily Mail reported. This could especially affect older women.

Researchers at the University of California say that women who regularly experience daytime drowsiness face a twofold higher risk of dementia. This could happen even if they are getting eight hours of sleep at night. The problem arises when they do not get quality rest.

A good night's sleep is linked to neurological health and rejuvenation of the mind and the body. It is also responsible for the consolidation of new memories and information. But when the sleep quality is bad, these processes suffer, thus affecting the mind. Similarly, dementia can also affect overall sleep and the processes linked to it.

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Proof of link between poor sleep and dementia?

However, the study does not offer conclusive evidence about whether poor sleep disrupts the brain's normal waste-removal and rejuvenation processes during rest. It also doesn't say if progressive brain decay causes poor sleep quality.

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Data from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures (SOF), which enrolled women 65 and up from Baltimore, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Portland, Oregon, between 1986 and 1988, was used by the researchers for the study. Scientists from UC San Francisco and UC San Diego studied 733 women with an average age of 83. None of them were suffering from cognitive impairment at the start of the study.

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Older women developed cognitive impairment and dementia

They did follow-ups and later, after 2002, used a device called actigraphs worn on the wrist, that used a sensor to measure movement and continuously recorded sleeping and waking activity. Cognitive testing was done regularly throughout the study to learn about any changes that were happening. They noticed that over a third of the women experienced declining nighttime sleep.

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Overall, more than half of the women were found to have poor sleep patterns over five years. Over 22 per cent of women developed cognitive impairment and 13 per cent of them developed dementia over the following five years when the researchers regularly checked in with them.

Worryingly, despite adjusting for age, education, and race, the risk of developing dementia linked to daytime sleepiness still remained double.