Loss of Sleep Possibly Associated With Alzheimer’s
July 20, 2007 by Mary Emma Allen
Filed under Diseases & Conditions
When I read the article in Everyday Health, Poor Memory Tied to Sleep Woes in Aging Women, and its possible connection with Alzheimer’s, my thoughts turned to my mom who developed this disease. For years, before I recognized that Mother was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, my dad would remark, “Your mother is up all hours of the night, reading, writing, baking. She only sleeps for a short time.”
When I’d say something to Mother, she would reply, “I don’t see any sense wasting time lying there if I can’t sleep.”
Mother probably did get adequate sleep over the course of 24 hours. Often she’d nap in a chair between chores, errands, and in the earliest years, operating her country grocery store.
I have no idea whether there was a connection between Mother’s requiring relatively little sleep at one stretch and her developing Alzheimer’s. Or was this just Mother’s personality. Many people, when they can’t sleep, lie in bed tossing and turning and then complain because they can’t sleep. Mother didn’t see the sense of wasting that time, so arose and did something she enjoyed.
Many of the letters she wrote me (I lived 275 miles away) were composed in those sleepless hours. I’ve discovered, as I’ve gone through Mother’s odds and ends of papers, that she wrote poetry at that time. When she had her grocery store and baked for customers and made brownies, bread, and other goodies from 3 AM on.
According to this article, “Older women with memory problems are more likely have trouble falling asleep and staying asleep than those without memory loss a U.S. study [Univ. of California, San Francisco] finds.”
So….if you can’t sleep and are in the “older” category, are you likely to develop Alzheimer’s? I don’t think that’s always the case. And it may have been simply coincidence that Mother required less sleep than Father. Eventually, perhaps research will be able to give us a definite answer.
I find myself not wanting to waste those hours the relatively few times I can’t sleep, so get up and work on some writing or quilting projects. Then daylight comes and I don’t see the sense of going back to bed. If I’m tired, I’ll “cat nap” as Mother called it.
Oh! Oh! But I usually still can find my keys.
I think you might have a theory there and shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it.
My Dad is in the last stage of alzheimers and i think back to the very early indications of the disease .
it would appear that he had given up sleeping all together – he would take little cat naps here and there – but hadn’t put in a good 8 hours sleep in over twenty years.
i decided to keep vigilant track of his sleeping ( because the truth was i was awake too)
he would sleep for maybe thirty minutes at a time every six hours -this pattern contimued day and night – so after seeking professional help and getting sleeping medication from the doctor his sleeping increased from thirty minutes to maybe two hours – i could hear him up all night long looking through drawers doing laundry – the doctor said it was common for older people to not need as much sleep – but only sleeping four hours in a 48 hour period and that occuring after taking a tranquilizer that would put an elephant to sleep?? – shouldn’t that be cause for alarm ?? – obviously not to the doctor – i was exhausted and when i found myself dozing off during conversations – decided to have my mom watch him – so i could sleep for a few days – she also has the same very strange sleeping pattern – she use to wake up at 2 am to cook breakfast for her and my dad after going to sleep at 11pm.
anyway the point of my long story is that the ridiculous lack of sleep was my first indication that my Dad had alzheimers.
Lisa, thank you so much for sharing these experiences. Mother’s strange sleep patterns also got more extreme as the Alzheimer’s became worse. By the time she lived with us she often was up much of the night, and I never slept soundly, wondering what she was doing. I found myself exhausted, too, during the day. And Mother simply “cat napped,” gaining energy for the nightly excursions.