The CDC says dementia is a general term for the impaired ability to remember, think or make decisions that interfere with one’s daily life, however, it’s not actually a specific disease. The most common type of dementia is Alzheimer’s disease. 

There’s still a lot to learn when it comes to dementia, but an upstate New York dementia specialist says new findings are associating the kind of sleep you typically get with the condition.

Known by many as deep sleep, slow-wave sleep is the 70 to 90 minutes of sleep in which your body restores itself.

"Slow-wave sleep [are] [stages] three and four that we are sleeping the deepest," said Dr. Kinga Szigeti, founding director of the Alzheimer’s Disease and Memory Disorders Center at UB. "And there's a lot of data that in those slow-wave sleep periods of time, our brain is actually clearing out the junk."

Dr. Szigeti broke down a study published in October in the Journal of the American Medical Association Neurology. The study suggests that a decreased amount of slow-wave sleep is a risk factor for cognitive impairment and dementia.  

"Now, what we have to understand is that when we are studying certain things in people, we only are looking at association," Szigeti said. "We know that people who have less of their slow-wave sleep will be more likely to have dementia. But we don't know the causation."

She says experts don’t yet know if the decreased amount of sleep causes dementia or if it’s a symptom, there’s still much to learn. Dr. Szigeti says the association between the loss of slow-wave sleep and dementia has been known for quite a long time, but this study is special because it’s longitudinal, repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time. 

She says it’s building on the Framingham Heart Study. Dr. Szigeti says as the study subjects aged, researchers expanded the data they collected to include brain and cognition data and then followed them if they evolved into dementia. 

"It's a very valuable data set that it's impossible to do it because you need all this time to really follow these patients, retain them in this study, capture the data that you need and then analyze it," Szigeti said.

Dr. Szigeti says the findings of the recent study probably apply to those who have chronic sleep issues and who can change their sleep habits. So what can people do to ensure they get enough slow-wave sleep? Experts say there’s a detailed instruction list called sleep hygiene. 

One of those things Dr. Szigeti suggests avoiding scrolling on electronics for long periods of time.

"Limit your caffeine intake, make sure you do some exercise, but not too late at night," Szigeti said. "You don't eat and not too late and not too much and not too heavy food and develop a bedtime routine. Read a book in a dim light, listen to music or take a bath with some scented oils."