A study published this week suggests that a common sleeping medication, zolpidem, may disrupt the brain’s ability to “cleanse” itself during sleep, potentially raising the risk of Alzheimer’s and other neurological disorders.
In research published in the journal Cell, Danish scientists said they have obtained more insight into the glymphatic system, which allows the brain to be flushed of toxic materials during sleep.
“It is not known what drives brain clearance during sleep,” they said in an abstract of their study. “We here employed an array of technologies and identified tightly synchronized oscillations in norepinephrine, cerebral blood volume, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as the strongest predictors of glymphatic clearance during NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep.”…