Study links deep sleep loss to dementia risk after 60
Turns out, losing just a little bit of deep sleep each year (about 1%) can bump up your risk of dementia by 27% if you're over 60.
Deep sleep is the phase where your brain cleans out harmful proteins linked to Alzheimer's, so it's more important than most people realize.
Associate professor Matthew Pase, who led the study, emphasized how crucial this stage is for keeping our brains healthy as we age.
About 15% of participants developed dementia
Researchers followed 346 older adults for 17 years and saw that deep sleep steadily dropped as people got older, especially between ages 75 and 80.
By the end of the study, about 15% had developed dementia.
Even after factoring in things like age and medication use, less deep sleep still meant higher risk, so fixing sleep issues or sticking to good routines could actually help protect your brain.