A new study has found that people having poor sleep quality in early middle age show higher levels of shrinkage which is a sign of brain ageing. The study was published in the journal Neurology. A group of 589 people aged 40 years on average responded to sleep questionnaires both at the beginning of the study and again five years later.
The participants had their brains scanned 15 years after the study began. Clémence Cavaillès, from the University of California San Francisco and corresponding author said, “Our study, which used brain scans to determine participants’ brain age, suggests that poor sleep is linked to nearly three years of additional brain ageing as early as middle age.” Cavaillès said that poor sleep habits have been linked to poor thinking and memory in later life, putting people at higher risk for dementia.
The researchers categorised participants’ sleep habits as such; short sleep duration, bad sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, early morning awakening and daytime sleepiness. They were thus divided into three groups according to low, middle and high levels of poor sleep habits. The researchers said that brain shrinkage revealed in the brain scans were used for gauging brain age, with higher levels indicating a greater age.
The team also found that people having middle levels of poor sleep habits had a brain age that was on average 1.6 years older than that of the people having low levels of poor sleep. Those ha.