United States: People in their 40s or 50s who have issues falling asleep or staying asleep may not be as healthy as their brains age, a new study reveals.
“Our study, which used brain scans to determine participants’ brain age, suggests that poor sleep is linked to nearly three years of additional brain aging as early as middle age,” said study lead author Clémence Cavaillès of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), as reported by HealthDay.
The study was supported by the National Institute on Aging and was released on October 23rd in the Neurology journal.
Poor Sleep Patterns and Brain Aging
In this study, the UCSF team looked at 589 individuals who were 39.85 years old on average at baseline into the trial. To this end, participants completed self-administered questionnaires assessing sleep patterns at two different time points, first when they were 40 years old and second when they were 45 years or slightly before this age.
Questions included, “Do you usually have trouble falling asleep?” “Do you usually wake up several times at night?” and “Do you usually wake up far too early?”
Survey replies led the researchers to draw up 6 poor sleep characteristics:
- Short sleep duration
- bad sleep quality
- difficulty falling asleep,
- difficulty staying asleep
- early morning awakening
- daytime sleepiness
Each participant received brain imaging following their 55th birthday to assess their cortical aging process.
Cavaillès and his colleagues ruled out potential confounds like age, sex, hypertension, and diabetes; they determined that participants with four or more of the poor sleep characteristics had brains that were essentially 2.6 years older than the brains of participants with zero or one poor sleep characteristic.
Insights from the Study
People with two or three bad sleep characteristics had brains that were 1.6 years older by age 55 than those without any of these characteristics or who only had one.
However, these findings of the study were merely correlational, and the researchers could not conclusively say that poor sleep causes the brain to age.
Future Directions
However, “our findings highlight the importance of addressing sleep problems earlier in life to preserve brain health, including maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, exercising, avoiding caffeine and alcohol if going to bed, and using relaxation techniques,” said study co-author Dr. Kristine Yaffe, vice chair of research in psychiatry at UCSF, as reported by HealthDay.
“Future research should focus on finding new ways to improve sleep quality and investigating the long-term impact of sleep on brain health in younger people,” she said in a journal news release.