3 Common Sleep Habits Have Been Tied To Brain Ageing

You may already know that how you sleep can affect how you age – getting fewer than six hours a night has been associated with faster ageing and a higher risk of “all-cause mortality”.

Poor sleep, particularly in midlife, is linked to a greater likelihood of developing dementia.

But what does “bad” sleep really mean?

A new paper published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia has used data from over 23,000 middle-aged and older adults to work out “three sleep behaviors distinctly associated with a marker of brain ageing in healthy people”.

These were found from a list of five sleep behaviours measured in the study.

The researchers used a combination of brain scans and questionnaire responses from participants to work out whether certain sleep behaviours may be linked to brain ageing.

From 2006 to 2010, participants were asked to fill in a baseline questionnaire about the following:

• sleep duration,
• daytime napping,
• sleeplessness,
• unintentional daytime dozing, and
• snoring.

Roughly nine years later, the scientists conducted MRI scans.

They found that all five of these sleep issues were linked to greater white matter lesion volumes, associated with brain ageing.

But after adjusting for other factors that can also create the issue, like smoking, vascular health issues, inactivity, and high blood pressure, only three seemed to be linked to increased brain ageing.

1. sleeping less than seven or more than nine hours a night,
2. frequent daytime napping, and
3. sleeplessness.

In follow-up research, the scientists found that shorter sleep duration might be more harmful than overly long kip.

The study’s senior author, Professor Gene Alexander, said: “Our findings suggest that having too little sleep may lead to greater white matter lesion volumes in the brain as we age.

“We didn’t see greater white matter impacts in people who reported longer sleep durations, but this needs to be followed up in cohorts with more long sleeper.”

Additionally, he noted that the study didn’t capture nap duration, so it could be missing key information about which naps are better or worse for our brains.

“Sleep is one of those potentially modifiable risk factors. If we can improve the quality of our sleep, it may help reduce the impacts of brain ageing and maybe even lower the risk for dementias like Alzheimer’s disease,” Prof Alexander ended.