Sleeping our way to better brain health

Sleep: It’s something we all have to do, yet few of us understand why it’s so critical to our health or what goes on inside our bodies — and our brains — when we tuck into bed each night.

Carleara Weiss has dedicated her career to demystifying the science of sleep. As an assistant professor of nursing at UB, she leads NIH-supported studies to investigate the links between sleep and cognitive health, with a special focus on Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. Her research has identified clear correlations between poor sleep quality and neurodegeneration, and these findings inform the interventions she uses to help people overcome their struggles with sleep.

The effort is part of Weiss’ larger and more ambitious aim: to prevent serious cognitive decline before it starts.

As a recent guest on University Communications’ Driven to Discover podcast, Weiss delves into all things sleep and brain health. She recounts how her interest in sleep traces back to her childhood growing up in an intergenerational household. Lying awake at night, she would listen to her grandmother and great-grandmother snoring from three bedrooms down the hall.

“At the time, we didn't know that loud snoring was something that should be investigated,” Weiss says.

It turned out that both women had obstructive sleep apnea. And years later, both developed Alzheimer’s disease. There was little research at the time showing the connections among loud snoring, obstructive sleep apnea and Alzheimer’s, so the symptom was ignored.

Now, there’s a growing body of knowledge linking sleep with cognitive health, and Weiss is actively contributing to our understanding of the subject. She regularly gives talks in the local community to highlight the centrality of sleep for brain health, and she has become a go-to sleep expert tapped by major media outlets around the country to offer practical strategies for getting a better night’s rest.

On the podcast, Weiss imparts these insights and more, discussing everything from lucid dreams and melatonin to bedtime routines and aging. The conversation yields some surprises — sleep quality doesn’t have to suffer as we get older — and some common-sense tips — when it comes to bedtimes, consistency is key.

At the heart of the conversation — and Weiss’ work generally — is the desire to develop interventions and educate the public in ways that empower people to retain, and even boost, their cognitive health.

And the memory of her elder relatives has remained a guiding force in these efforts. Every time she gives a talk, she says, “I hope that somebody’s grandmother gets better health by listening to it.”