Childhood nightmares linked to increased risk of dementia in older adults

Recurring nightmares in childhood can be a precursor to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease in older people. A British neurologist came to this conclusion after analyzing the life histories of thousands of children born in 1958, according to the study. published in the journal eClinicalMedicine.
In 2022, neurologist Abidemi Otaikou from the University of Birmingham showed that middle-aged and older people who often have nightmares at night are more than twice as likely to develop dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Considering that many people who complain of nightmares in adulthood said that they frequently had nightmares in childhood, the scientist set out to find out if childhood nightmares could be an early precursor to neurodegenerative diseases in the first place. ‘adulthood.
To do this, he relied on data from the National Study of Child Development, launched in Britain in 1958, a longitudinal cohort study in which scientists follow the lives of 17,000 people born in a week in the country. of Wales, England and Scotland. When the children were 7 and 11, their mothers answered a series of questions, including whether the children had had nightmares in the past three months.
The author grouped the data of 6,991 children according to the answer to this question – “never”, “sometimes” and “always”. He then used statistical data processing methods to understand whether childhood nightmares are associated with the likelihood of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease or dementia at age 50 (2008).
“The results clearly show that the more regularly children have nightmares, the more likely they are to develop cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s disease,” said the author of the work. So, in children who constantly saw nightmares, the risk of cognitive impairment in adulthood was 76% higher, the risk of Parkinson’s disease was 640%.
At the same time, the situation has not changed for both boys and girls.
According to the author, however, childhood nightmares are no cause for panic. “Of the 7,000 children in my study, only 268 (4%) had constant nightmares. Of these children, only 17 (6%) developed cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s disease by the age of 50.” Otaikou suggests that the link between childhood nightmares and neurodegenerative diseases in the elderly may have a genetic basis that remains to be explored. “A gene associated with persistent nightmares (PTPRJ) is also known to be associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease in older people. It is therefore possible that nightmares and progressive brain diseases are caused by a certain set of genes,” the author believes.