I read this article online about a small study.

[CWM84]

I just read this study and I am wondering is this true or inconclusive?

https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/Pres ... 20dementia.

After adjusting for age and sex, researchers found links between both a lower percentage of REM sleep and a longer time to get to the REM sleep stage and a greater risk of dementia.

Here is my problem with that line... I can go to bed at 11, and be sleepy and put my mask on and turn over and fall asleep and wake up 2 hours later just a long enough of a time to look at the bright alarm clock sitting on my dresser and close my eyes again. ( Their only open for maybe 2 sec just long enough to look at the time )

But here is the thing.. I cannot tell if it takes me a long time to go into REM sleep or not. I feel stuck sometimes.. I feel like I am laying there with my eyes closed. I eventually do go into REM sleep but I am not sure how long it takes me. It feels like hours apon hours.

Does this mean I am having problems getting into REM sleep or am I just dreaming * No pun intended* that it takes me hours to go to sleep?

I know that its supposed to take 2 hours to fall into a deep enough sleep that you go into REM sleep. I wear my mask through out the night and I wake up after 9 hours and I do not go to sleep at any time during the day I am wide awake from the time my eyes pop open at 8:30 to 8:45ish until 11 PM. So that must mean I am getting enough sleep right?

I am due for a study but the doctor wants to wait until COVID is over with.

Thanks,
Chris

[CWM84]

Like for instance after dozing back off i had a short dream that I cant remember and then a really long one that seemed like it lasted for hours about working at a dept store and how my dept was so easy to work in bc we never had anything to do. Lol

[Julie]

Download Oscar (see top of pg notes) and post a couple of nights' results here according to directions. Experts here will interpret for you and explain what's what and suggest possible changes in e.g. pressure, etc. Without seeing how you really sleep it's hard to comment on anything much.

[Miss Emerita]

Hello, CWM84. People can have dreams in all sleep stages, not just REM, and people also often don't know they have dreamed unless they wake up at the end of the dreaming period. Bottom line: it isn't really possible to know how much REM you are getting without getting wired up to an EEG machine.

There are sleep-tracking devices that guesstimate how long your sleep stages last throughout the night, but I'm skeptical about their accuracy. I used one that actually has a little bit of EEG capacity, and it is clearly wrong a fair amount of the time.

For what it's worth: REM sleep tends to happen more during the second half of the night than the first; the first is when we tend to get more of our deep sleep. And if you're feeling alert during the day, with your memory firing on all cylinders, you are probably doing just fine in the REM department.

About the study: it looks like they didn't try to control for have/don't have apnea. In other words, the study doesn't seem to rule out the possibility that untreated apnea caused some people both to have less REM and to develop dementia. (Untreated apnea is correlated with dementia as well as heart disease.)

[LauraElizabeth]

Hello, social scientist here. I’d need to read the study, but after glancing at abstract, a few thoughts:

How often were they gathering EEG data over the course of the study? How completely did they characterize REM amounts in their participant population? Adequately baselining an individual’s typical REM sleep, much less updating that baseline over the 12 year study period, sounds like a LOT of data and you’d need very cooperative participants. I’m skeptical.

Also, there’s not necessarily a causal relationship between REM and dementia - mediating variables that co-occur with both dementia *and* sleep architecture could be (and likely are) at work - they mention shift work. I’m sure there are others. Etc., etc.

Maybe it’s a gold-plated, beautifully controlled piece of research with a rock solid experimental design, but those are rare (and expensive to pull off). If that’s the case, I’ll beg the authors’ forgiveness amd admire their diligence.

Don’t waste sleep cycles worrying about this! Brains are complicated. Get some quality sleep, take care of yourself as best as you can.

[elsueno]

x

[CWM84]

[quote="Miss Emerita" post_id=1377382 time=1613347321 user_id=88778

For what it's worth: REM sleep tends to happen more during the second half of the night than the first; the first is when we tend to get more of our deep sleep. And if you're feeling alert during the day, with your memory firing on all cylinders, you are probably doing just fine in the REM department.


So what does that mean when it comes to sleep as in what cycles are we doing until rem kicks in the 2nd half of the night? 1,2,3?

[CWM84]

Hello, social scientist here. I’d need to read the study, but after glancing at abstract, a few thoughts:

How often were they gathering EEG data over the course of the study? How completely did they characterize REM amounts in their participant population? Adequately baselining an individual’s typical REM sleep, much less updating that baseline over the 12 year study period, sounds like a LOT of data and you’d need very cooperative participants. I’m skeptical.

Also, there’s not necessarily a causal relationship between REM and dementia - mediating variables that co-occur with both dementia *and* sleep architecture could be (and likely are) at work - they mention shift work. I’m sure there are others. Etc., etc.

Maybe it’s a gold-plated, beautifully controlled piece of research with a rock solid experimental design, but those are rare (and expensive to pull off). If that’s the case, I’ll beg the authors’ forgiveness amd admire their diligence.

Don’t waste sleep cycles worrying about this! Brains are complicated. Get some quality sleep, take care of yourself as best as you can.

Hello,
So If I understood you correctly that there is too many flaws in this study to be considered legit?

Thanks,
Chris

[Miss Emerita]

Typically we get REM in our early sleep cycles -- just shorter periods than in the second half of the night. Similarly, we get longer periods of deep sleep in the early sleep cycles, then short periods, or none, during the later part of the night. You can see the general idea here:

https://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_11 ... p_cyc.html

A couple of additional thoughts. It is common to wake up briefly after REM sleep. Sleep cycles can be anywhere from 50 to 90 minutes long. And most good sleepers don't have completely tidy and "typical" sequences of sleep stages.

[ChicagoGranny]

I just read this study and I am wondering is this true or inconclusive?

The article states that the results are inconclusive.

From the article ---->

Limitations of the study include a small sample size. Studies on larger groups of people need to be done to confirm findings. There was also no data available on shift work among study participants, which can cause unusual sleep patterns and possibly lead to sleep disorders.

BTW, an individual cannot subjectively determine when they are in REM. An EEG is required.

[SDBud]

I just read this study and I am wondering is this true or inconclusive?

https://www.aan.com/PressRoom/Home/Pres ... 20dementia.

After adjusting for age and sex, researchers found links between both a lower percentage of REM sleep and a longer time to get to the REM sleep stage and a greater risk of dementia.

I KIND of hope that's true, as I spend over 30% of my sleep in REM, sometimes over 40%. Deep sleep is usually below normal, but not badly so.

[LauraElizabeth]

I am a cognitive scientist, not a neurologist, and my only interest in sleep is because I have apnea. I'm reading this as someone who's got a background in basic experimental design, not a neurologist or sleep researcher. A neurologist might have a completely different interpretation.

The research is legitimate but it's very limited. From what I read, they analyzed data collected under the Framingham study. They asked, "Hey, we have this huge dataset. Is there a relationship between sleep architecture/REM and dementia?" They ran some statistical analyses and found what I'd call an interesting artifact in the data.

I'd read this as a heads' up to neurologists to do more research on sleep and dementia. And that's as far as I'd go.

Frankly, it kind of drives me nuts when preliminary analyses like this are released with fanfare to the public, because people freak out over what's basically a statistical association in an existing dataset. Those statistical analyses can be useful for helping researchers identify new questions for investigation, but I definitely wouldn't be making medical decisions with this.

That's my two cents.

[chunkyfrog]

I noticed as a child that lying in bed in the dark, on the cusp of sleep,
my perceptions of time and scale became unpredictable.
This effect has carried over into adulthood, at least the time part.
What feels like an hour is really a few minutes.(at night)
Some say to turn the clock around, so you cannot see it.
I put it where I have to lift my head to see it.
This works for me--you may do whatever fits.
Accept the fact that the brain needs rest, and may be trying to tell you so.