A little known sleep disorder could be a warning sign that foreshadows the likeliness of developing brain diseases such as Parkinson's and dementia.
REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) impacts around one per cent of the general population and two per cent of people over 65. REM is one of the stages of the sleep cycle and stands for rapid eye movement.
In this stage, people enter a state of low muscle tone throughout the body meaning your muscles don't 'act out' your dreams. However, anyone who suffers with REM sleep behaviour disorder respond to their dreams, which can cause injuries - as Mirror Online reports.
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Some 60 per cent of patients and 20 per cent of bed partners of people with the disorder have reported injuries during sleep as suffer. The disorder is not fully understood. It can appear at any age but usually starts for people in their 40s and 50s.
Younger women and men are affected in equal numbers but over 50 it tends to affect men more often. It has been associated with neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.
Scientists have conducted a long term study to work out if REM sleep behaviour disorder may foreshadow these horrible diseases. The research has looked at 1,280 patients with the disorder to see how other issues developed in the observed participants.
It is seen in 25 to 58 per cent of patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s and 70 to 80 per cent of patients with dementia with Lewy bodies.
After 12 years, 73.5 per cent of those with REM sleep behaviour disorder had developed a related neurodegenerative illness.
Other things that were shown to increase the risk of developing a neurodegenerative disorder were irregular motor symptoms, abnormal dopamine levels, loss of sense of smell, cognitive impairment, abnormal colour vision, erectile dysfunction, constipation and older age.
RBD may be detectable decades before the symptoms fully develop and early detection would help researchers study the disease. But at this time there are few therapies in way of treatment but melatonin and clonazepam can be used as medicine to improve the symptoms.
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