As if nighttime nightmares weren’t bad enough…
Let’s talk about dreams.
Which is a bold move, because in most circumstances the idea of listening to someone bang on about their nocturnal distractions is a giant conversational red flag.
Face it, almost nobody wants to hear about that dream where you found yourself shopping naked in Coles and couldn’t find the Cornettos.
However, a recent British study using data from the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study, and published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine, has unearthed some findings which seem quite nightmarish.
The researchers found that folks who experienced frequent nightmares in middle childhood (defined as between ages 7 to 11) might be at an increased risk of developing cognitive impairment, such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease, in later life.
To be clear at the outset, the boffins claim only to have established a correlation, not causation, and stress that further studies are required to firm up the findings, but the link is unsettling. Of the nearly 7000 children studied and followed up at aged 50, around 4% were found to have either cognitive impairment or Parkinson’s.
According to the study, children that reported frequent distressing dreams were 76% more likely to develop cognitive impairment and a whopping seven times more likely to have a diagnosis of Parkinson’s, with the pattern similar for both boys and girls.
Writing in The Conversation, study author Abidemi Otaiku, a clinical fellow in Neurology at the University of Birmingham, said the findings raised the intriguing possibility that reducing bad dream frequency during early life could be an early opportunity to prevent both conditions.
He also stressed that parents of children prone to nightmares should not be overly alarmed, as the “vast majority of people who have persistent bad dreams in childhood are not going to develop early-onset dementia or Parkinson’s”.
Speculating on causality, Otaiku suggested it was possible that nightmares and progressive brain diseases were both caused by a shared set of genes.
Which is hardly a comforting thought for those whose sleepy times are already regularly haunted by distressing mental imagery!
Sharing story tips with penny@medicalrepublic.com.au is cognitively enriching.
