Sleep is critical for clearing amyloid-beta plaques from the brain and for repairing cellular damage, including DNA repair and activating antioxidant enzymes.

“is actually slow waves themselves which is bad news for us as we get older. And those slow waves get smaller. And so your sleep goes away.”

“So this study in particular showed that this area of the brain that I mentioned previously, the medical prefrontal cortex, it's very important for generating a type of slow wave sleep that then is important for clearing out beta-amyloid. And so if you're not generating a lot of that type of sleep, then you're going to have an accumulation of beta-amyloid. And conversely, if you have a lot of beta-amyloid, it's going to suppress that type of sleep. It's a feedback loop.”

“Not to mention you're repairing damage when you sleep. DNA repair, enzymes, antioxidant enzymes. These are all being turned on, some of them by melatonin, some of them by possibly other circadian rhythm genes, but those are being turned on during sleep.”