Sleep duration linked to slower aging in large study

But what exactly constitutes healthy sleep?

We know that frequent, involuntary naps during the day can be a sign of dementia-related brain changes, while going to bed after 1 a.m. may not be the best way to “age healthy” (even if you’re naturally a night owl).

And now a study published in Nature identifies sleep duration which appears to be associated with “biological age gaps”.

Our chronological age is easy to calculate – it simply means how long we have been alive.

But our biological age, which measures our wear and tear at the cellular level, shows how the old parts of our body “behave”.

Therefore, a “biological age gap” means that a person’s body behaves either younger or older than their birthday suggests.

Higher biological age is linked to a higher risk of disease and mortality, while a negative biological age gap (cells that act younger than your age) could reduce your risk of stroke and brain disease.

In this study, researchers examined data from the MULTI Consortium, an ongoing research project. that goals has bring together biomedical data Since multiple organs And different molecular sources so that scientists can better understand aging and disease.

The in-depth analysis looked at information from around half a million adults.

“This is the first study, to our knowledge, that reveals broad agreement between sleep duration and multi-organ and multi-omics (whole system) aging clocks and links these signatures to systemic disease outcomes and mortality risk,” the Nature study reads.

They discovered that people who slept between 6.4 and 7.8 hours one night seemed to face the slowest biological aging.

And compared to sleeping duration of six to eight hours, sleeping more or less was associated with an “increased risk of systemic diseases beyond the brain and all-cause mortality.”

This was measured using 23 biological ‘clocks’, which looked at how 17 organ systems appeared to be behaving.

But again, this optimal “window” was not the same for each part of the body.

For example, one study measuring heart-related proteins suggested that six hours might be the “sweet spot,” while another that measured brain proteins put it at eight hours.

But in general, those who slept between six and eight hours had better health and aging outcomes, as well as lower cases of diseases like type 2 diabetes and depression.

This article did not prove that sleeping about six to eight hours definitively led to a lower biological age, or that getting more or less shut-eye was responsible for worse health and mortality outcomes. He just showed a link.

For example, a disease that ages your organ(s) and can increase your risk of mortality may also affect your sleep.

Study author Junhao Wen said: “Personally, I think it’s bidirectional. » In other words, poor sleep can accelerate aging or accelerate disease, which in turn could make sleep worse – or vice versa.