Share this @internewscast.com
New research on brain imaging published in the journal eBioMedicine suggests that individuals with poor sleep tend to have brains that look older than they actually are. Previously, lack of adequate sleep has been linked to dementia, and this new study sheds light on the relationship between the two.
Abigail Dove, a researcher from the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at the Karolinska Institutet, stated: “Our research indicates that inadequate sleep may accelerate brain aging, likely due to inflammation. Since sleep patterns can be changed, improving sleep quality could potentially prevent or slow down brain aging and cognitive decline. For every one-point drop in healthy sleep scores, the disparity between brain age and actual age increased by roughly six months. People with poor sleep patterns had brains that seemed about one year older than their chronological age.”
The research tracked 27,500 middle-aged and older participants from the UK Biobank who underwent MRI scans of their brains.
Using machine learning, scientists assessed each participant’s biological brain age and compared it with their chronological age, which is based on birthdate.
The participants were also assigned a sleep quality score based on five different factors:
- Sleep duration per day, including naps
- Insomnia
- Snoring
- Daytime sleepiness
- Chronotype – whether they described themselves as a morning or night person
In the study, individuals who woke up early, achieved seven to eight hours of sleep, and did not suffer from insomnia, snoring, or daytime drowsiness scored the highest with five points. The ‘healthy’ sleepers were those who scored four points or higher, intermediate sleepers scored two to three points, and poor sleepers scored one point or less.
Results indicated that both intermediate and poor sleepers had a “significantly higher” gap between their brain age and actual age compared to healthy sleepers. The research found that brain aging accelerated by about six months for each point lost due to poor sleeping habits.
On average, those with an intermediate sleep score exhibited a brain age about seven months older than their chronological age, while individuals in the poor sleep group showed a brain age nearly a year older than their actual age.
The study concluded: “Having an older brain age is an early indicator of a departure from optimal brain health. Our findings relating poor sleep to older brain age support the notion that poor sleep may be a risk factor for the development of dementia.
“Future studies are necessary to determine whether improving sleep characteristics can prolong brain and cognitive health.”
The study also discovered that those with mediocre and poor sleep patterns were more likely to be older, male, have a higher BMI and prevalent cardiometabolic diseases. They were also less likely to have a university degree and a healthy lifestyle.
As for why sleep impacts brain age, some theories highlighted by News Medical suggest that the brain’s waste clearance system, which is primarily active during sleep, is negatively impacted by poor sleep. Alternatively, poor sleep could affect cardiovascular health which in turn has a detrimental effect on the brain.
