Talk about brain drain.
We know that a bad night’s sleep can leave us groggy, grumpy and unable to focus, which can affect our judgment and productivity.
It turns out that restlessness fueled by a few poor habits can also accelerate brain aging by several months, new research reports.
Looking at the brain scans and sleep patterns of over 27,000 middle-aged and older adults, researchers from Sweden and China suggested that people with the worst sleep patterns had brains that were, on average, one year older than their chronological age.
People with subpar sleep had brains that were only about seven months older on average.
To figure out what made the brain age faster, researchers explored five crucial aspects of sleep.
Being a night owl, experiencing insomnia, snoring, getting less than seven hours of sleep a night and feeling excessively sleepy during the day were all indicators of poor sleep.
One point was deducted from the participants’ sleep health score for each habit they practiced.
Only 41% had healthy sleep, which translated to four or five points on a five-point scale. More than half of the participants only received two or three good sleep points.
For each deducted point, the gap between the brain’s biological age and the person’s actual age grew by half a year.
The two sleep habits that had the greatest effect on brain age? Being a night owl and snoring.
Those with poor or fair sleep were more likely to be older, male, obese, impoverished and have conditions that raise the risk of heart attack or stroke, according to the findings published in eBioMedicine.
A large brain gap — or an estimated brain age that’s physically older than the person’s actual age — can be an early warning sign of poor brain health and significantly raise the risk of conditions like dementia.
Inflammation may be the culprit. A lack of sleep can trigger inflammatory responses designed to protect the body from disease and injury.
This inflammation sticks around and can lead to cognitive damage and decline, including the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Though our brains age with, well, age, the researchers determined that it was the sleep habits that worsened brain health.
None of the participants, who were followed for about nine years, showed signs of dementia, stroke or other neurological conditions at the start of the study.
