Could Extra Sleep Improve Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease?

Extra sleep could help the brain recover from serious neurological defects that would normally inhibit the formation of memories, according to a new study.

Researchers studied memory capabilities in 3 groups of fruit flies with disabled genes critical to memory.¹

“Given the role that sleep plays in modulating plasticity, we hypothesized that increasing sleep would restore memory to canonical memory mutants without specifically rescuing the causal molecular lesion,” ² said the study’s authors.
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According to researchers, each of the 3 groups of flies manifested a different memory-inhibiting condition.  The first group saw effects similar to Alzheimer’s disease, another group the disabled gene interfered with the fly’s ability to strengthen new connections that encode memories, and the final group had too many connections encoding memories.¹

“Sleep was increased using three independent strategies: activating the dorsal fan-shaped body, increasing the expression of Fatty acid binding protein (dFabp), or by administering the GABA-A agonist 4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazolo-[5,4-c]pyridine-3-ol (THIP),” they said.²

The investigators discovered that an additional 3 to 4 hours of sleep daily—over a minimum of 2 days—restored the ability to make memories in the flies regardless of the technique used to increase sleep.¹

However, the investigators noted that the lost or disabled gene still did not work correctly in all of the flies, even after the 3 techniques were used.¹

“Sleep can’t bring that missing gene back, but it finds ways to work around the physiological problem,” they concluded.

The complete study is published in the April issue of Current Biology.

-Michelle Canales Butcher

References:

1. Washington University in St. Louis. Extra sleep fixes memory problems in flies with Alzheimer’s-like condition. April 23, 2015. https://news.wustl.edu/news/Pages/Extra-sleep-fixes-memory-problems-in-flies-with-Alzheimers-like-condition.aspx. Accessed April 27, 2015.

2. Dissel S, Angadi V, Kirszenblat L, et al. Sleep restores behavioral plasticity to drosophila mutants. Curr Biol. 2015 April [epub ahead of print] doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.03.027.