Poor Sleep Tied to Accelerated Brain Aging

 

How will your competent? doctor use this to make sure you have THE EXACT CORRECT SLEEP PROTOCOL? Doing nothing I bet!

Do you prefer your doctor and hospital incompetence NOT KNOWING? OR NOT DOING?

Poor Sleep Tied to Accelerated Brain Aging

Poor sleep quality has been linked to accelerated brain aging, potentially driven by inflammation, new research showed.

Middle-aged and older adults with poor sleep were more likely to have brains that looked older than their chronological age.

“Our findings provide evidence that poor sleep may contribute to accelerated brain aging and point to inflammation as one of the underlying mechanisms,” said principal investigator Abigail Dove, PhD, postdoctoral researcher with the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Solna, Sweden, in a press release.

“Since sleep is modifiable, it may be possible to prevent accelerated brain aging and perhaps even cognitive decline through healthier sleep,” she added.

The study was published online on September 30 in The Lancet eBioMedicine.

Sleep Disturbance and Dementia

There is growing evidence of a link between poor sleep and a heightened risk for dementia. 

However, the investigators noted that it remains unclear whether poor sleep quality contributes to the development of dementia or is a result of prodromal disease, highlighting the need to better understand the link between sleep and brain aging.

A smaller 2024 study of more than 500 people showed that disrupted sleep in early middle age was associated with increased signs of brain aging later in life.

The Swedish investigators analyzed data from 27,500 participants (mean age, 54 years, 54% female) in the UK Biobank and assessed sleep quality using self-reported surveys.

Sleep health was evaluated based on sleep length, insomnia, snoring, and daytime sleepiness and whether participants were early birds or nighthawks. Participants were then grouped into three sleep patterns: healthy (≥ 4 points), intermediate (2-3 points) or poor (≤ 1 point).

An average of 8.9 years after baseline assessment, participants underwent brain MRI. The researchers estimated brain age using a machine learning model based on 1079 MRI scan markers, including the number of lesions in specific brain regions or the microstructure of different white matter tracts. 

In particular, 285 of these markers influenced the brain age estimate most strongly. 

“In simple terms, these features on a brain MRI scan are the strongest indicators that make the brain appear ‘older,’” Dove told Medscape Medical News in an email.

Inflammation was measured using mediation analysis and the INFLA score, which is based on blood inflammatory biomarkers.

The researchers used linear regression and generalized structural equation models to analyze the data and adjusted for age, sex, education level, race, socioeconomic status, lifestyle, and cardiometabolic disease.

The Role of Inflammation

At baseline, 55.6% of participants had an intermediate sleep pattern, 41.2% had healthy sleep, and 3.3% had poor sleep.

Compared to those with a healthy sleep pattern, participants with intermediate or poor sleep were more likely to be male and older, and to have a higher BMI and lower socioeconomic status. 

The difference between a person’s actual age and brain age was significantly higher among those with an intermediate (beta, 0.24 [0.11, 0.38], P = .010) or poor (beta, 0.50 [0.12, 0.87], P < .001) sleep pattern, compared to healthy sleepers. 

“Brain age was on average 0.62 years older than chronological age among people with an intermediate sleep pattern and 0.99 years older among those with a poor sleep pattern,” the investigators wrote.

The gap between brain age and the person’s actual age grew 0.48 years with each point decrease in sleep score. Inflammation mediated 6.81% and 10.42% of the associations between intermediate and poor sleep and higher brain age gap, respectively.

“This underscores that inflammation is a major mechanism connecting sleep to brain aging, although it is not the only factor at play,” Dove said. Other mechanisms could play a role, such as the glymphatic system, commonly dubbed the brain’s waste disposal system.

Study limitations included the self-reported nature of sleep quality and the fact that UK Biobank participants tend to be healthier and more socioeconomically advantaged than the general population.

The authors reported no disclosures. The study was funded by Alzheimerfonden, Demensfonden, Loo and Hans Osterman Foundation for Medical Research, the Knowledge Foundation, and the Swedish Research Council.