Out of curiosity, @DSeid, have you seen a lot of patients with phenylketonuria? I might have seen two since my clinical clerkship.
I don’t want to discuss this sidetrack too much in this thread, but this putative link between poor sleep and dementia and neurodysfunction is also interesting. (NYT limited gift link, not a journal).
Well, that’s why, when I nap, i try to do so for about 90 minutes. That ought to give me a full sleep cycle.
Embarrassed that I can’t say for sure but less than a handful.
(Not a doctor)
I’ve seen a variety of research making me think that dementia becomes more likely with either of a) poor clearing of junk from the brain, and/or b) insufficient resources for the brain.
A healthy diet with omega-3s, choline, B6, B9, and B12 should keep one pretty good but with modern diets omega-3s can be more scarce, and too much overly white flour and rice and too few vegetables might harm you on the B vitamins.
It’s also possible that we’re deficient in CoQ-10 and Phosphitydilserine due to abandoning the consumption of offal and brains.
High dose creatine might help to provide more energy to the brain - and, in the modern, complex world, maybe we need more than our ancestors generally did.
During four years of medical school, we spent under a week discussing sleep. A lot less is known about it than one might expect. And good studies showing some of how the glymphatic system works took until 2012.