A new study found that about seven hours of sleep is the ideal night’s rest, with insufficient and excessive sleep associated with reduced ability to pay attention, remember and learn new things, solve problems and make decisions.
Seven hours of sleep have also been found to be associated with better mental health, with people experiencing more symptoms of anxiety and depression and poorer general well-being if they report sleeping longer or shorter.
“Although we can’t say for sure that too little or too much sleep causes cognitive problems, our analysis of individuals over a long period of time seems to support this idea,” said Jiangfeng Feng, a professor at Fudan University in China and author of the study, published in the scientific journal Nature Aging, said in a statement.
“But the reasons older people have worse sleep seem to be complex, influenced by a combination of our genetic makeup and the structure of our brains.”
Researchers from China and the United Kingdom analyzed data from nearly 500,000 adults aged 38 to 73 who were part of Britain’s biobank, a long-term, government-backed health study. Participants were asked about their patterns of sleep, mental health and well-being and took part in a series of cognitive tests. Brain images and genetic data were available to nearly 40,000 of the study participants.
Other studies have found that older people who have significant difficulty falling asleep and who experience frequent nocturnal awakenings are at high risk of developing dementia or early death for whatever reason, while sleeping less than six hours of sleep. night is associated with cardiovascular disease.
One of the reasons for the connection between too little sleep and cognitive decline may be due to the disturbance of deep sleep, which is when the brain recovers the body from wear and tear during the day and consolidates memories. Too little sleep is also associated with the accumulation of amyloid, a key protein that can cause entanglement in the brain, which characterizes some form of dementia. The study also says that prolonged sleep duration may result from poor quality, fragmented sleep.
Dr. Raj Dasgupta, a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and an assistant professor of clinical medicine at Keck Medical School at the University of Southern California, said longer sleep was associated with cognitive problems, but it’s not entirely clear. why.
“This signals future research and treatment,” said Dasgupta, who was not involved in the study. “Sleep is essential as we age and need as much as younger people, but it’s harder to find.
The study had some limitations – it only assessed how long participants slept in general, and not any other measure of sleep quality, such as waking up at night. Moreover, participants reported their amount of sleep so that it was not objectively measured. However, the authors said that the large number of people involved in the study means that its conclusions are likely to be stable.
The authors said their findings suggest it is important that sleep, ideally about seven hours, be consistent.
The study found a link between too much and too little sleep and cognitive problems, not cause and effect, warned Russell Foster, a professor at Oxford University and director of Sir Jules Thorne’s Institute of Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience, who was not involved. in the study. He said the study did not take into account people’s health and that short or long sleep could be an indication of basic health conditions with cognitive problems.
He also said that taking the average of seven hours as the ideal amount of sleep “ignores the fact that there are significant individual variations in sleep duration” and quality. More or less sleep can be completely healthy for some people, he said.
“We are regularly told that the ‘ideal’ night of sleep for adults should be seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. This belief is wrong in so many ways. Sleep is like the size of a shoe; “One size fits all, and classifying ‘good sleep’ can cause confusion and anxiety for many,” said Foster, author of the upcoming book Time in Life: The New Science of the Body Clock and How It Can Revolutionize Your Body. sleep and health ”.
“How long we sleep, our preferred time to sleep and how many times we wake up at night varies greatly between people and with age. Sleep is dynamic and we all have different patterns of sleep and the key is to judge what our individual is. the needs are. “
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