Cognitive Decline in Elderly Women May Cause Poor Sleep

Filed in archive Cases , Studies on July 17, 2007

Because I live with my mother, there are a few things I now know about older women: they're ultra-forgetful and can barely sleep at night.

If old age is all about cognitive decline and sleepless nights, I am starting to dread getting older. I can still sleep soundly and continuously into the night most of the time, on disturbed nights - I read a lot, watch TV/videos a lot or write a lot so I'll get tired enough to go to sleep - most of the time, these works and so I am not really complaining yet.

But when I look into my mother - I cannot imagine what it would be like not being able to sleep - it must be awful. Especially for someone like me who loves to sleep longer hours than normal.

Anyway, researchers at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) have an interesting association of cognitive decline to poor sleeping: women who experienced cognitive decline over a 13 to 15 year period after age 65 were more likely to sleep poorly than women whose cognition did not decline.

According to lead author Kristine Yaffe, MD, chief of geriatric psychiatry at SFVAMC and professor of psychiatry, neurology, epidemiology, and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF):

"Sleep is very complex. It involves a coordinated series of neurologic functions that we don't entirely understand. It's not unlikely that early neurodegenerative disease could start having an effect on sleep centers as well.

It's been known for some time that people with cognitive problems often have sleep problems, but those studies have mostly been done on severely demented people in nursing homes.

Ours was the first study to look at the relationship between sleep and cognition in healthy women dwelling in the community who did not have dementia to begin with."

Find more details from the full report.