Poor Sleep Could Age The Brain
A large brain imaging study from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet found that the brains of people with poor sleep tend to appear older than their actual age. Researchers analyzed MRI scans from 27,500 middle-aged and older adults in the UK Biobank, using machine learning to estimate biological brain age. Sleep quality was scored based on five factors — chronotype, sleep duration, insomnia, snoring, and daytime sleepiness — and categorized as healthy, intermediate, or poor.
The results showed that each one-point drop in sleep quality corresponded to a six-month increase in brain age. On average, the brains of people with poor sleep appeared about one year older than their chronological age. The study also found that low-grade inflammation explained about 10 percent of the link between poor sleep and accelerated brain aging. Other possible explanations include impaired brain waste clearance and cardiovascular influences related to poor sleep.
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