If you find yourself sleepy during your daily activities in your older age, you may need to consider it more than an inconvenience — since the fatigue may indicate you’re at higher risk for developing a condition that can lead to dementia , a new study has found. Among participants who experienced excessive daytime sleepiness and a lack of enthusiasm, 35.5 per cent developed motoric cognitive risk syndrome compared with 6.
7 per cent of people without those problems, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology. Motoric cognitive risk syndrome, or MCR, is marked by slow walking speed and complaints of memory problems among older people who don’t already have dementia or a mobility disability. The risk of developing dementia more than doubles in those with this syndrome, which was first described in 2013.
“Previous studies have shown a link between sleep disorders and the risk of dementia,” said first study author Dr. Victoire Leroy, assistant professor of geriatric medicine at Tours University Hospital in France, via email. But some of those scientific reports examined that link largely at only one point in time, according to the study.
Not much has been known about the relationship between certain aspects of poor-quality sleep and pre-dementia syndromes, either, Leroy and the research team wrote — so they wanted to expand the research in this field. “Establishing the relationship between sleep dysfunction and MCR risk is important because .