Children who experience frequent nightmares are more likely to be diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease later in life, according to a new study.
While the research shouldn’t scare parents off—after all, up to 50 percent of children experience nightmares from time to time—it’s not the first time bad dreams and cognitive decline have been linked in this way.
The study, published in the journal Lancet eClinicalMedicine, concluded that children who have persistent distressing dreams have a 76 percent increased risk of experiencing cognitive decline at age 50, compared to children who did not report having bad dreams.
Even more surprising, children who had nightmares were almost seven times more likely to develop Parkinson’s at that age.
Abidemi Otaiku, a clinical neurologist at the University of Birmingham, came to these findings by looking at data from the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study, which collects information on all people in Britain who were born during a single week in March 1958.
In 1965 and 1969, when the participants were 7 and 11 years old, respectively, their parents were questioned on the subject of nightmares. Otaiku then compared this data with follow-up information collected at 50 years on cognitive decline and Parkinson’s. In all, nearly 7,000 people (50 percent men, 50 percent women) were included in the analysis.
The research did not seek to find a causal relationship between childhood nightmares and cognitive problems in adulthood. In other words, another factor could directly explain why certain children will develop cognitive decline and nightmare experiences simply correlate with it.
However, there is some solid evidence that this strange link runs deeper than previously thought.
These explanations are not yet proven, but if there is more evidence to back them up, it raises the exciting possibility that preventing nightmares could perhaps prevent cognitive decline.
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