3 ms·

Could this be linked to the other studies that found Alcohol to be a big contibutor to Demantia? http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43141457 http://www.bbc.com/new

• Bartweiss 9y ago
  Offhand, probably not. First, because the amyloid hypothesis is specifically about Alzheimer's-type dementia, while alcohol appears to raise the risk of other dementia outcomes as well. Second, alcohol appears to be a much larger risk factor than other serious sleep-deprivation or sleep-disruption situations from military service to insomnia, suggesting that it's acting by some other mechanism. Obviously this is a hard answer since we don't actually know what causes dementia - at present, we can't even distinguish "sleep deprivation causes amyloid plaques which cause Alzheimer's" from "Alzheimer's causes sleep deprivation which causes amyloid plaques". But I think there's at minimum good evidence that sleep issues aren't the primary mechanism for alcohol to cause dementia.