Everyone knows the amount of sleep we have is important and as you get older it becomes ever more difficult.
A lack of sleep sadly is a feature of dementia and European researchers have tracked 8,000 people, aged 50 and beyond for about 25 years, to see if insufficient sleep leads to the brain changes that underlie dementia.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that those that regularly reported sleeping for six or less hours a night were 30 per cent more likely to develop dementia later in life than those that enjoyed seven hours or more – regardless of whether they had other health issues, like heart disease, poor diet, poor mental health, or smoking.
Using medical records and other data from a prominent study of British civil servants, known as Whitehall II, which began in the mid-eighties, the researchers tracked how many hours 7,959 participants said they slept in reports filed six times between 1985 and 2016.
By the end of the study, 521 people had been diagnosed with dementia at an average age of 77.
“By using a very long follow-up period, we have found that short duration sleep in midlife, assessed more than 25 years before mean age at dementia onset, is associated with dementia risk in late life,” said lead author Dr. Séverine Sabia, a researcher at the Université de Paris and the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London.
“While we cannot confirm that not sleeping enough actually increases the risk of dementia, there are plenty of reasons why a good night’s sleep might be good for brain health. These findings confirm the importance of sleep hygiene for health.”
