Study links sleep duration and consistency to slower biological aging and lower disease risk

Recent research has found an association between sleep duration and biological aging. Image Credit: ArtistGNDphotography/Getty Images A recent study found that too little or too much sleep may speed aging in the brain and other organs.  The study used aging clocks to examine associations between sleep and various mental health and medical conditions.  The researchers also found a direct link between sleep and late-life depression. Sleep is an important aspect of overall health and emotional well-being. The amount and quality of sleep you get can affect your body in various ways.  A recent study published in Nature found that getting too little or too much sleep may speed aging in the brain and other areas of the body.  Previous research has linked low sleep to faster brain aging. This study, however, takes that further and shows an association between the amount of sleep you get and the aging of nearly every organ.  “Sleep is fundamental for healthy aging and longevity. More importantly, it is potentially modifiable,” said lead study author Junhao Wen, PhD, assistant professor of radiological sciences at Columbia University. “In this study, we measure biological aging clocks across organs to link these clocks with sleep duration,” Wen told Healthline. Sleep duration may speed up aging in brain, organs Chronological age is the number of years you have been alive. Biological age measures how quickly your cells and tissues are aging.  Studies like this examine biological aging and the various factors that can affect it.  Aging clocks have become increasingly popular in these types of studies. These clocks are scientific, computational models that estimate a person’s biological age and how they are aging faster or slower than their chronological age. These estimates are based on biological data from the individual.  Most aging clocks measure age across the whole body. However, organs may age at different rates. The research team behind the study has been instrumental in developing aging clocks for specific organs. These clocks can provide more specific and personalized information to individuals.  The study used data from half a million participants in the UK Biobank and machine learning to identify signatures of aging in the organs.  The researchers then assessed the relationship between a person’s self-reported sleep duration and their biological age, using 23 aging clocks across 17 organs.  The study defined too little sleep as less than 6 hours and too much sleep as more than 8 hours.  They found that, in general, people who slept too little or too much showed signs of faster biological aging than those who reported sleeping between 6.4 and 7.8 hours each day.  It is important to note that this doesn’t mean that your sleep duration alone causes organs to age faster or slower. However, it does suggest that both too little or too much sleep may play a role in poorer overall health across your body.  “Short sleep duration is associated with immune dysregulation and increased systemic inflammation, impairing tissue repair and metabolic homeostasis. It also disrupts glucose regulation and overall energy balance,” said Sarathi Bhattacharyya, MD, pulmonologist, sleep medicine specialist, and medical director of MemorialCare Sleep Disorders Center at Long Beach Medical Center in Long Beach, CA. Bhattacharyya wasn’t involved in the study. “Additionally, insufficient sleep increases sympathetic nervous system activity, which may contribute to accelerated cellular aging across multiple organ systems,” he told Healthline. Bhattacharyya noted that too much sleep can have adverse effects. “Prolonged sleep duration may be associated with similar adverse aging outcomes,” he said. “In many cases, longer sleep may reflect underlying or subclinical pathology that itself contributes to accelerated aging.”  How sleep duration impacts chronic disease risk The study showed a relationship between sleep and chronic diseases. This suggests that a connection exists beyond brain influence.  Too little sleep was associated with brain disorders like depression and anxiety disorders. An association was also found between short sleep and medical conditions, such as:  obesity type 2 diabetes hypertension ischemic heart disease heart arrhythmias “Short sleep is often more associated with stress of a busy lifestyle, and anxiety. It can lead to elevated blood pressure, cortisol, and blood glucose levels, which all have detrimental effects over time,” said Alex Dimitriu, MD, a double board certified psychiatry and sleep medicine specialist and founder of Menlo Park Psychiatry & Sleep Medicine in California. Dimitriu wasn’t involved in the study.  Too little and too much sleep were also found to be associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, and various gastrointestinal disorders like gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and gastritis.  “Longer sleep is associated with depression, but more so [with] illness of the body. People who are sick or unhealthy may thus require more sleep than 8 hours per night. For long sleepers, it is more likely that illness causes longer sleep, rather than longer sleep causing illness,” Dimitriu told Healthline.  How much sleep do you need? According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), adults between the ages of 18 and 60 need at least 7 hours of sleep.  Adults ages 61 to 64 require 7 to 9 hours of sleep, and those ages 65 and older require 7 to 8 hours.  Sleep duration may impact late-life depression The organ-specific aging clocks from this study may also be useful for determining how sleep is related to specific conditions. For example, this study used them to look more closely at how sleep may be associated with late-life depression.  The study could not definitively determine whether sleep duration directly caused late-life depression or whether late-life depression influenced sleep duration. However, the researchers did apply mediation analysis to late-life depression.  With this, they examined whether aging clocks mediate the relationship between sleep and late-life depression. Their analysis suggests that too little sleep may directly influence the disease burden of late-life depression. Too much sleep may influence late-life depression via a mediation pathway that underlies the brain and adipose clocks.  Wen said that the study’s findings may impact future sleep research and management.  “One should manage sleep optimization in a systematic way that considers his/her medical history because we observed a different sleep-organ U-shaped pattern. Also, doctors should treat long sleepers and short sleepers differently, as shown in Fig.4’s mediation analyses between short/long sleep vs. late-life depression,” he said.  Tips for improving sleep  Quality sleep is important for overall health. “Despite the 7-hour ideal sleep time, give yourself a window of at least 8 hours to sleep. Aim for 8, by eating earlier, slowing down earlier, turning off screens earlier, so you can actually get about 7 quality hours of sleep,” Dmitriu said.  Bhattacharyya said that optimal sleep requires appropriate management of underlying medical and psychiatric conditions, as well as environmental and behavioral factors. “Maintaining a consistent wake time is particularly important for stabilizing circadian rhythm. Adherence to good sleep hygiene — especially during the evening wind-down period — is also essential,” he said.

The amount of hours you spend asleep isn’t the be-all end-all when it comes to health: one study found that sleep regularity was more strongly linked to a longer life than sleep duration.But that’s not to say it doesn’t matter. Getting at least seven hours’ shut-eye nightly seems to help us live longer, function better, and even lower our dementia risk. And the lead author of recent research published in Nature, Junhao Wen, has said: “Previous studies have found that sleep is largely linked to ageing and the pathological burden of the brain.“Our study goes further and shows that too little and too much sleep are associated with faster ageing in nearly every organ, supporting the idea that sleep is important in maintaining organ health within a coordinated brain-body network, including metabolic balance, and a healthy immune system.” How much sleep should I get to age better?Using data collected from half a million members of the UK Biobank (a depositary of thousands of participants’ health data that scientists can use for health research), Wen created 23 “ageing clocks” to predict the rate of ageing of various organs and body systems. He then compared that to the participants’ sleep patterns.The paper said that those who sleep less than six hours or more than eight hours a night saw faster ageing, on average: a “U-shaped” association.And there appeared to be a sleep duration sweet spot, too. The least amount of ageing seemed to happen in those who slept between 6.4 and 7.8 hours a night in this research, though this varied by “organ and sex in the UK Biobank (aged 37-84 years)”.And people who neither slept too much nor too little seemed to be at a lower risk of “all-cause mortality”, too. Poor sleep was also linked to increased risk of disease In this research, either too much or too little sleep was linked to a higher likelihood of disease. Short sleep was linked to depression, anxiety, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, ischemic heart disease, and heart arrhythmia. Both short and long sleep were associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and multiple digestive issues, including gastritis and gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). “The broad brain-body pattern is important because it tells us that sleep duration is a deeply embedded part of our entire physiology, with far-reaching implications across the body,” said Wen. The paper read, “Our results underscore the systemic biological adverse associations of disturbed sleep and provide a compelling framework for more targeted and thoughtful attention to sleep disturbance as a potential signal of emerging health issues and a partner in the quest to promote healthy ageing, reduce disease risk and extend lifespan.” Related...The Italian Walking Method That Helps Heart Health, Sleep, And Blood SugarI Tried Simba's New Sleep Collection And It Has Absolutely Changed My lifeA Common Sleep Pattern In Midlife Could 'Double' Heart Attack Risk