What’s Your Body Posture During Sleep?

First, question asked. What’s your posture during your sleep? Lying On Side, Lying Flat or Lying On Front? New study results have shown that lying on one’s side may help prevent Alzheimer disease. A report on the Journal of Neuroscience claimed that compared to lying flat and lying on one’s front, lying on one’s side can more efficiently remove the waste of the brain. And this posture was also proven to have the ability to reduce the risk of catching Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other Neurodegenerative diseases. For the accumulation of waste in the brain fosters high risk of occurrence of these diseases.What’s Your Body Posture During Sleep?

By applying Dynamic Enhanced Magnetic resonance imaging, scientists imaged the Lymphatic channels in the brain. And they found that lying on one’s side is the best posture for the clearance of brain wastes and other harmful chemicals. Among most of the human beings and animals, side sleeping position is the most common one.

The glymphatic pathway expedites clearance of waste, including soluble amyloid β (Aβ) from the brain. Transport through this pathway is controlled by the brain’s arousal level because, during sleep or anesthesia, the brain’s interstitial space volume expands (compared with wakefulness), resulting in faster waste removal. To validate the MRI data and to assess specifically the influence of body posture on clearance of Aβ, the scientists used fluorescence microscopy and radioactive tracers, respectively. And the data has shown that the glymphatic transport was most efficient in the lateral sleeping position compared with the supine or prone position.

Lateral position is one of the most popular sleeping positions, and we now have adapted to it, this however, is very critical for the effective removal of brain metabolic wastes; this study might have provided new data for future in-depth study on the body health research; many types of dementia are related to sleep disorders, and these include difficulty in falling asleep. And sleep disorders can accelerate memory loss in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. By revealing what sleeping position is more beneficial to mankind, this study, indirectly, offers a new way of thinking and provides hope for the development of novel therapy for the treatment of various neurodegenerative diseases.