How much sleep is enough to protect your brain health?
A study just published in the journal JAMA Neurology suggests that the length of your sleep time plays a major role in brain health, including the prevention of early onset dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
Sleep quality.
In numerous studies, sleep quality research has shown that quality of sleep is associated with cognitive function. One study, for example, in the Nature journal, tested working memory, executive functions, and several processes involved in procedural learning in a group of healthy young adult university undergraduates ( Zavecz et al., 2020).
It is widely accepted that when you experience poor sleep quality (including difficulties falling asleep, waking up frequently during the night, or feeling tired during the day), your cognitive performance decreases. Memory and attention capacity is often reduced among those who experience sleep insufficiency.
Studies of sleep quality and young adults.
Researchers Zavecz and colleagues found surprising results, however, in three different studies measuring sleep quality, procedural learning, working memory, and executive functioning among their sample of healthy young adults. Sleep disturbance was not associated with cognitive performance.
Chronic sleep deprivation apparently has little impact on cognitive functioning among healthy young adults. Young adults are not as prone to the negative consequences of interrupted sleep as the elderly.
What do studies of older adults reveal about sleep and cognitive function?
In a recent study of 4417 older adults with normal cognition in the JAMA Neurology journal, sleeping duration of less than 6 hours or more than 9 hours was associated with distinct deficits in cognitive performance as well as greater depressive symptoms and a higher body mass index.
Too little sleep doesn’t seem to impact healthy young adults as much as older adults who are also healthy when we compare results of the two studies.
“In this cross-sectional study, both short and long sleep durations were associated with worse outcomes for older adults, such as greater Aβ burden, greater depressive symptoms, higher body mass index, and cognitive decline, emphasizing the importance of maintaining adequate sleep” say researchers Winer, Peters, and Kennedy.
(Aβ burden refers to brain amyloid-β accumulation, an Alzheimer disease pathology).
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Originally published at https://www.psych-news.com on August 31, 2021.