United States: If you are very tired during the day as you age the problem could be more acute than mere tiredness. According to brand-new research, if you feel more fatigued than usual it might be that you are a candidate for dementia, an illness that affects the brain’s ability to think and remember. Thus, it would help if you listened to your tiredness as you go through the older age of life.

Participants with excessive daytime sleepiness and no enthusiasm had motoric cognitive risk syndrome at 67% as compared to only 6.7% of people with no such complaints, according to the Neurology journal published on Wednesday.

As reported by CNN Health, Motoric cognitive risk, abbreviated MCR, refers to an outgoing geriatric syndrome characterized by slow gait speed and self-reported memory decline in adults not already affected by dementia or mobility impairment. There is more than a twofold increased risk for dementia in people affected by this syndrome that was initially identified in 2013.

Earlier research has indicated that sleep disorders raise the possibility of dementia, explained the first author of the study, Dr Victoire Leroy, an assistant professor of geriatric medicine at Tours University Hospital in France, by email.

However, some of those scientific reports looked at that link mostly at just one moment in time, the study found. Leroy and the research team also noted that little was known regarding the connection between aspects of poor sleep quality and pre-dementia syndromes, either — therefore, the authors aimed to advance this line of research.

“Differentiating between sleep dysfunction’s impact on new-onset MCR or risk for overall dementia is significant given the potential for early intervention in the development of dementia,” the authors noted.

Tracking sleep patterns

The data come from 445 older adults who were angiogenically aged 76 years at the time of recruitment from Westchester County, New York, and who are part of the Central Control of Mobility and Aging (CCMA) study, which seeks to evaluate the cognitive processes and the neural substrates underlying such processes, as they pertain to mobility in the elderly. They were required to walk on treadmills for four minutes so their baseline gait could be captured and were followed up each year from 2011 to 2018.

The study authors also obtained annual data of self-reported sleep quality and duration for the two weeks before a test.