If You Have Trouble Falling Or Staying Asleep, It Can Make You Age Faster And Put You At A Higher Risk For Dementia
Having trouble sleeping could signal issues with brain health in middle age. Researchers from the American Academy of Neurology found that difficulties with both falling asleep and staying asleep are correlated with brain aging.
“Sleep problems have been linked in previous research to poor thinking and memory skills later in life, putting people at higher risk for dementia,” said Dr. Clémence Cavaillès, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of California San Francisco.
“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.”
The researchers used data from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study, which tracked a group of 589 people for several years. At the beginning of the study, the participants were around 40-years-old.
They were asked questions about their sleep habits, such as whether they had any issues with falling or staying asleep, if they woke up too early, and how long they slept each night. They had to answer the same questions five years later.
They measured their sleep behavior using the six indicators of poor sleep: low sleep quality, short sleep duration, trouble falling asleep, trouble staying asleep, early morning awakening, and daytime sleepiness.
The information was used to categorize participants as having zero to one, two to three, or more than three poor sleep characteristics.
The low group consisted of 70 percent of participants, while 22 percent were in the middle group, and eight percent were in the high group.
When the participants were in their mid-50s, around 15 years later, they had brain MRI scans. The researchers analyzed the brain scans with a machine learning technique and calculated each person’s “brain age,” which refers to how old the brain appeared compared to actual chronological age.
volha_r – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person – pictured above is a woman asleep in her bed
They found that people who had two to three sleep issues showed signs of brain aging. Their brains were 1.6 years older than those who only had one sleep issue.
People who reported three or more sleep issues had a brain age that was 2.6 years older. Faster brain aging was linked to when the sleep problems persisted for more than five years.
“Our findings highlight the importance of addressing sleep problems earlier in life to preserve brain health, including maintaining a consistent schedule, exercising, avoiding caffeine and alcohol before going to bed, and using relaxation techniques,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a researcher at the University of California San Francisco and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.
“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.”
The study was published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal Neurology.
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