People in early middle age who have poor sleep quality, including having difficulty falling or staying asleep, have more signs of poor brain health in late middle age, according to a study published in the October 23, 2024, online issue of Neurology ® , the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study does not prove that poor sleep accelerates brain aging. It only shows an association between poor sleep quality and signs of brain aging.
Sleep problems have been linked in previous research to poor thinking and memory skills later in life, putting people at higher risk for dementia. Our study which used brain scans to determine participants' brain age, suggests that poor sleep is linked to nearly three years of additional brain aging as early as middle age." Clémence Cavaillès, PhD, study author of the University of California San Francisco The study included 589 people with an average age of 40 at the start of the study.
Participants completed sleep questionnaires both at the beginning of the study and again five years later. Participants had brain scans 15 years after the study began. Researchers reviewed participants' responses to questions such as, "Do you usually have trouble falling asleep?" "Do you usually wake up several times at night?" and "Do you usually wake up far too early?" They recorded the number of six poor sleep characteristics for each participant: short sleep duration, bad sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying .
