Sleep Well for a Healthy Brain

Getting under seven hours sleep a night can lead to premature ageing of the brain, say scientists. However, they also say that sleeping more than seven hours can lead to fragmented lower quality sleep and that this will age the brain too.

In a study conducted by public health scientists, it was found that middle-aged adults who regularly had less than six hours sleep a night over a five-year period fared badly in various cognitive tests including reasoning and vocabulary.

It was also observed that people who slept over eight hours a night tended to suffer accelerated cognitive decline.

However the good news is that signs of healthy brain ageing were seen in women who slept seven hours a night and men who slept between six and eight hours. It seems that we all need to sleep for seven hours a night on a regular basis so that our brains can remain healthy and active.

The findings have led researchers to call for improved public health advice regarding the correct amount of sleep to maintain as people grow older.

Dr Jane Ferrie, head of the research in the department of epidemiology and public health at University College London, commented that having less than or more than the recommended amount of sleep amounted to ageing between four and seven years.

Dr Ferrie said: "Sleep duration generally decreases with age and so does cognitive function, so we wanted to see if there was a relationship with that change in sleep. It was surprising that when people have longer durations of sleep, they had a lower cognitive function scores in all of the tests apart from memory.

She explained that longer periods of sleep could mean that sleep has become fragmented so that spending longer periods of time in bed does not necessarily improve the quality or length of sleep but could mean that sleep has been broken. Such fragmentation of sleep could mean a cognitive deficit, causing ageing between four and seven years.

Dr Ferrie called for public health authorities to take a more serious view of sleep problems when they give advice and said that further work needed to be done to find out how changes in sleep patterns influence cognitive function in adults.

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