Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast. Okay, just imagine a future where a new

sleeping pill held the promise of potentially reducing your risk for developing Alzheimer's disease

in the same way that exercise, nutrition and and well-managed blood pressure do?

Indeed, until recently, the very opposite seemed to be more likely.

That is, the use of common sleeping pills such as the benzodiazepines and then drugs like

Ambien have all been associated with a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease,

not a lowering of the risk. Although that is not a causal relationship so far. However, a new class

of sleeping pills that are now out on the market suggest the potential. And again, I want to be so tentative as it is

early days and it is only the potential of reducing your Alzheimer's risk. Before we get to that,

let me take a step back and set the table so that the experiments and new discoveries I'll

describe later make any kind of sense.

Over the past 15 years, we and many others in the field have discovered that there is a significant

and now causal connection between poor quality and inadequate quantity of sleep

and the development of accelerated Alzheimer's disease

pathology in the brain. Let's talk about the fact of what happens to your brain when you sleep

at night. In other words, your brain's night shift duty. While you're asleep, specifically in deep sleep, a specialized cleaning crew

operates like a city's sanitation department methodically clearing waste that accumulates during

waking hours. We call this the glymphatic system. During deep sleep, spaces between brain cells expand by 60%, allowing cerebrospinal

fluid to pressure wash away toxins. Among the waste products removed, amyloid beta and tau

proteins, the molecular villains of Alzheimer's disease. The brain's amyloid clearance doubles during deep sleep

compared to wakefulness.

This represents one of neuroscience's most important recent discoveries,

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