The first signs of dementia and Parkinson’s disease could lie in the content of your nightmares, a leading neuroscientist has revealed.
According to eminent brain health expert Dr. Rahul Jandial, dreaming of violent or threatening scenes – such as being chased, killed or running from a threat – could indicate premature brain decline seen in a wide range of neurological disorders.
Those most at risk are people whose disturbing dreams cause them to perform physical acts during sleep, such as hitting, kicking and even strangling their partner.
For example, research shows that as many as 97 percent of people who exhibit this behavior while sleeping will develop Parkinson’s disease or another neurological disorder within fourteen years.
Acting out dreams, such as running from a threat, clapping or singing, or throwing punches, is often a precursor to brain disorders.
In cases where the cause of REM behavior disorder is unknown, 97 percent of people who have it will be diagnosed with a brain disorder within about 14 years.
Experts have coined the problem of these types of nightmares, which often trigger physical action, REM behavior disorder, which is thought to affect about 0.5 to 1.25 percent of the general population, up to about 4.2 million people.
In Dr. Jandial’s new book, This Is Why You Dream, he explores the meaning and benefits of dreams.
He describes a 55-year-old male patient at the Los Angeles VA hospital who sought his help with new nightmares.
He had started reenacting them, screaming in his sleep and even punching his roommate in the face.
Dr. Jandial said: ‘We didn’t know it at the time, but this unique combination of symptoms – men in their 50s living their dreams – years later develop a type of brain disease called synucleinopathies. Not just sometimes, but almost always.’
The new book by Dr. Jandial explains why we dream about certain individuals and what our dreams mean for our health
Synucleinopathies is an umbrella term for diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and some forms of dementia, which are characterized by a buildup of a protein in the brain called alpha-synuclein.
This compound is involved in the regulation of hormones in neural areas.
In synucleinopathies, including Parkinson’s disease, Lewy body dementia (which causes changes in perosnality), and a little-known condition called multiple system atrophy, the protein accumulates and forms clumps that can disrupt normal cell functioning and lead to brain cell damage to lead.
Exactly how these clumps lead to dream-execution behavior is not known. But its ability to predict synucleinopathies is uncanny.
These disorders appear on average within 10 to 15 years after the onset of dream behavior disorder.
People with REM behavior disorder often have vivid, violent dreams about an immediate physical threat to themselves or someone they love.
Case studies have described people becoming violent: hitting, kicking, and wrestling their partners, and running in their sleep to escape the dream attacker.
However, the behavior is not always violent. People with this condition have reported singing or clapping in their sleep and even engaging in peaceful activities such as fishing.
Daniella Berg, a neurologist at the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, told Scientific American that among the early indications for Parkinson’s disease ‘RBD is special.
‘It’s the strongest clinical prodromal marker we have.’
Prodromal in medicine generally refers to early symptoms of a condition that appear long before the more advanced and specific signs of diseases.
Since meeting that patient at the VA, Dr. Jandial has seen several more patients like him with the sleep disorder, which led to neurological diagnoses.
Actor Alan Alda, who starred in the television series M*A*S*H, revealed that unusual dreams helped him be diagnosed with Parkinson’s.
Actor Alan Alda was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2018. A major clue to him was his violent dream execution behavior. Alda knew this could be an early symptom and asked his doctor for a test
The link between dream enactment behavior and Parkinson’s disease is still unfolding, but Mr. Alda had read an article about it in 2015 that prompted his doctor to test him for the brain disorder out of an abundance of caution.
Mr. Alda said in 2018: ‘By making your dreams come true, I mean I had a dream where someone attacked me and I threw a bag of potatoes at them, and in reality what I did was throw a pillow at my wife.
‘The doctor said, ‘Why do you want a scan? You have no symptoms’… And I said, I want to know if there’s anything I can do – I want to do it.”
RBD and Parkinson’s disease are both linked dysfunction in the brainstemwhich plays an important role in regulating sleep and exercise.
Dr. Jandial said: ‘Because acting out dreams and the new onset of nightmares are clinical precursors of Parkinson’s disease, arriving years, even decades before the first movement symptoms of the neurodegenerative disorder, paying attention to dreams and dreaming would help doctors could offer a rare opportunity for real early intervention.’
Severe nightmares are common in the late stages of the disease.
Nearly 80 percent of patients with Parkinson’s suffer from terrible nightmares.
Neurological disorders are not the only types of disorders that can be predicted by REM behavioral disorders.
In a study of heart patients, the types of dreams people had suggested how well they were recovering after a routine procedure to open narrowed arteries.
Researchers followed the patients for six months after they were discharged from the hospital and scored them on a six-point scale: cured, improved, unchanged, worse without readmission, worse with readmission, worse without hospitalization and death.
‘Men who dreamed of death and women who dreamed of divorce were significantly more likely to have worse clinical outcomes, regardless of the severity of their initial heart disease.
“This suggests that dreams somehow provided a clue to their prognosis.”