Sleeping well is essential to improve our quality of life. In theory, we spend a third of our lives doing it. However, sometimes it is difficult to fall asleep due to different factors such as stress, anxiety, insomnia and sleep disorders. There are several circumstances that tend to reduce that idyllic standard of eight hours a day. For many, sleeping poorly or less than what our body needs has to do with the nightmares or night terrors that make them wake up Little is still known about the relationship between bad dreams and health, but scientists are beginning to investigate and some of the results they are finding are nothing short of extraordinary.
This is the case of a study published in eClinicalMedicine, from The Lancet group, which claims to have proven that Children who have nightmares on a regular basis are at higher risk of developing dementia or Parkinson’s. Since Parkinson’s disease is still incurable and global prevalence is expected to double in the next decade, the scientific community considers it a priority to identify people who are at high risk of suffering from it. What was already known is that people with this devastating neurological condition are prone to frightening dreams, but scientists hadn’t considered using them as a warning sign until now.
It all started with a first publication that indicated that the frequent nightmares in adult men are associated with a higher probability of developing dementia in later years. It was the same team, led by Abidemi Otaiku, a researcher at the University of Birmingham (United Kingdom), who began to analyze what relationship there could be between nightmares and this condition. To do this, he collected data from studies conducted in the US in which 3,818 men aged 67 or older had been followed up extensively.
Thus, he verified that the subjects who had frequent nightmares during the first five years of research had three times as likely to develop Parkinson’s than those who did not dream them. In addition, middle-aged people who suffered bad dreams that caused them to wake up had four times the risk of suffering cognitive decline in the following decade. That research gave Otaiku’s team a clue: Most adults who had this sleep problem said they already had it as children.
The relationship between nightmares and Parkinson’s in children
That is why the researchers decided to go further: After the findings in adults, they focused on studying whether children’s nightmares also increase the probability of developing Parkinson’s in adult life. To find out this correlation was true, they used data from a British cohort study conducted in 1958. They grouped the participating children according to how often they experienced nightmares between the ages of 7 and 11, and then used a program to correlate this characteristic with the probabilities of developing cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s when they were 50 years old (in 2008).
What they discovered very significant. According to the new study, if a child between the ages of 7 and 11 constantly has bad dreams, she may have nearly twice as likely to develop cognitive impairment when I’m 50 years old. In other words, it would be anticipating what is going to happen to it in 40 years. But the association is even stronger in the case of Parkinson’s disease: these same children would have up to seven times more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when they turn half a century.
“The results were clear,” explains Otaiku in The Conversation. “The more regularly children experienced nightmares, the more likely they were to develop cognitive impairment or be diagnosed with Parkinson’s.” Specifically, children who had persistent nightmares were 76% more likely to develop cognitive impairment and 640% more likely to develop Parkinson’s. This pattern was similar in boys and girls.
It seems an alarming fact, but the truth is that few children have persistent nightmares. Specifically, of the approximately 7,000 children included in the study, 268 had these bad dreams that woke them up, 4%. Of these, by the time they were 50 years old, only 6% had developed cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s; that is, 17 people (6%).
Despite the surprising results of the study, Otaiku says that more studies would be needed to confirm whether nightmares condition people to later suffer from these neurodegenerative diseases, since experiencing nightmares is determined, to a large extent, by each person’s genetics. . In addition, the scientist highlighted that This does not mean that those who have nightmares will develop neurodegenerative diseases. necessarily. Simply, it is a very relevant study that could serve to pull the thread, better understand how our dreams influence and broaden the perspective in which research on Parkinson’s is carried out.
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