Oh Jeez, now something else to worry about

Heard of amyloid protein beta? You soon will. It's the new hot topic in Alzheimer's research. We all make the stuff in small amounts, but in Alzheimers the stuff accumulates around neurons in the brain, eventually destroying the connections which are crucial to retain memories. And now it has emerged that it is during sleep that much of this clogging stuff is dispersed, and new research suggests that people who are chronically sleep deprived are more at risk of developing the world's fastest growing plague.

Despite the fact that we spend a third of our lives sleeping and an enormous amount of research into the subject, remarkably little is known about it. Everyone knows if you miss a night's sleep you feel terrible, and that prolonged sleep deprivation leads to madness and death. It is intuitively self evident that we sleep to rest, both body and mind, but beyond that it remains one of the last great enigmas in physiology. But now the world's attention has focused on dementia to a degree unprecedented in science, the spotlight has now been directed to the importance of sleep in dispersing the aggregations of amyloid beta protein from the brain, and perhaps delaying or even preventing the onset of dementia.

So now, every time I wake in the middle of the night (as I do two or three times every night, is that normal? I bloody hope so) I find myself thinking: "Christ! What about me amyloid beta protein dispersal? Am I bound to get it now?"

Moral: get enough sleep, or watch your brain rot as you lie there checking the clock.