Middle-aged people who have poor sleep quality, including difficulty falling or staying asleep, have more signs of poor brain health in late middle age, according to a study published in the Oct. 23, 2024, online issue. Neurology®the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The research does not prove that poor sleep accelerates brain aging. It only shows a link between poor sleep quality and signs of brain aging.
Previous research has linked sleep problems to poor thinking and memory skills later in life, putting people at greater risk of dementia. Our study using brain scans to determine participants’ brain age suggests that poor sleep as early as middle age is linked to almost three years of additional brain aging.”
Clémence Cavailles, PhD, study author from the University of California, San Francisco
589 people participated in the study, with an average age of 40 years at the start of the study. Participants completed sleep questionnaires both at the beginning of the study and five years later. Participants received brain scans 15 years after the start of the study.
Researchers assessed participants’ responses to questions such as, “Do you usually have trouble falling asleep?” “Do you usually wake up several times during the night?” and “Do you usually wake up way too early?” They recorded the number of six poor sleep characteristics for each participant: short sleep duration, poor sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, waking up early in the morning and daytime sleepiness.
The participants were divided into three groups. Those in the low group had no more than one characteristic of poor sleep. People in the middle group had two to three, and those in the high group had more than three. At the start of the study, approximately 70% were in the low group, 22% in the medium group and 8% in the high group.
Researchers examined the brain scans of participants where the level of brain shrinkage corresponds to a specific age. Researchers used machine learning to determine the brain age of each participant.
After adjusting for factors such as age, gender, high blood pressure and diabetes, researchers found that people in the middle group had an average brain age that was 1.6 years older than those in the low group, while those in the high group had an average brain age. age 2.6 years older.
Among the sleep characteristics, poor sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep and waking up early in the morning were linked to older brain age, especially when people consistently had these poor sleep characteristics for five years.
“Our findings highlight the importance of addressing sleep problems earlier in life to maintain brain health, including maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, exercising, avoiding caffeine and alcohol before bed and using relaxation techniques ” says author Kristine Yaffe, MD, of the University of California San Francisco and member of the American Academy of Neurology. “Future research should focus on finding new ways to improve sleep quality and investigating the long-term effects of sleep on brain health in younger people.”
A limitation of the study was that participants reported their own sleep problems and it is possible that they did not report these accurately.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Aging.
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Magazine reference:
Cavailles, C., et al. (2024) Association of self-reported sleep characteristics with neuroimaging markers of brain aging years later in middle-aged adults. Neurology. doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0000000000209988.