Feeling old? Sleep quality might play a part in that, according to a new study
Have you ever woken up from a rough night’s sleep feeling grizzled, deflated and like you aged several years over the course of several hours? A new study suggests that your brain may have actually aged.
According to a new brain imaging study out of the Swedish Karolinska Institutet, the brains of people who regularly report poor sleep appear older than they actually are.
As one author for Bioengineer.org put it, “The implications of this research are profound, shedding new light on the biological interplay between sleep health and neurological aging trajectories.”
Conducting the study
The study, which analyzed the brains of 27,500 middle-aged and older British citizens through MRI scans, found that a brain could appear significantly older, based on a system that awarded points for healthy, intermediate and poor sleep.
Those points, in turn, were predicated on five self-reported factors, including whether someone identified themselves as a morning or evening person, the duration of their sleep on any given night, whether they suffered from insomnia, whether they snored and how sleepy they felt during the day.
“The gap between brain age and chronological age widened by about six months for every 1-point decrease in healthy sleep score,” Abigail Dove, the study’s lead researcher, said. “People with poor sleep had brains that appeared on average one year older than their actual age.”
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Older adults tend to experience less deep, slow-wave sleep than younger adults, and wake up an average of 3 to 4 times each night.
The brain scans and participants were pulled from the UK Biobank, a British-based repository of medical data and records. The scans were then fed through a machine learning model that attempted to estimate the age of each brain it analyzed.
Brain deterioration and sleep
While Dove and her team’s research doesn’t definitively prove anything, it does point to a potential link with dementia and neurodegeneration. That’s because brain deterioration in later life can be caused by low-grade inflammation, which is likewise exacerbated by sleep deprivation.
“Our findings provide evidence that poor sleep may contribute to accelerated brain aging and point to inflammation as one of the underlying mechanisms,” Dove said. “Since sleep is modifiable, it may be possible to prevent accelerated brain aging and perhaps even cognitive decline through healthier sleep.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
