Professor Tatia Lee’s Research Study Shows Bad Sleep Harms Old-Age Memory by Disrupting the Brain’s ‘Waste Removal System’
Professor Tatia M.C. Lee, Chair Professor of Psychological Science and Clinical Psychology and May Professor in Neuropsychology at HKU, led a study on how sleep quality affects glymphatic functioning and human brain networks in older adults.
The study analysed 72 older adults using functional MRI scans and sleep recordings. The research findings revealed that poor sleep quality adversely affects normal brain function by deactivating the restorative glymphatic system, which in turn affects memory performance in older adults. The results provided a novel perspective on the interplay between sleep, the glymphatic system and multimodal brain networks.
This study was recently published in Molecular Psychiatry in an article entitled “Effects of sleep on the glymphatic functioning and multimodal human brain network affecting memory in older adults”.