More Than This Many Hours of Sleep Is Linked to Early Death, Scientists Find

A study found a sleep “sweet spot” between 6.4 and 7.8 hours per night. Sleep durations below or above that range were associated with accelerated aging. This challenges the idea that everyone should get around eight hours and contrasts with findings that shorter sleep increases risks such as high blood pressure and heart disease. Optimal sleep varies by person, with some needing about six hours and others up to nine. A very small fraction of people appear to function well on about four hours without health consequences, potentially related to genetic differences affecting orexin. Researchers used biomedical data from 500,000 volunteers, including self-reported sleep, MRI organ images, and blood plasma and metabolomics, to study biological aging.

"In a study published in the journal Nature, scientists narrowed down a “sweet spot” of between 6.4 and 7.8 hours of sleep per night. Sleep durations that fall too much on either side of that, the study found, were associated with accelerated aging. This cuts against the traditional wisdom that everyone should get around eight hours of sleep per night, and it also notably contrasts with some studies that found that less than seven hours of sleep per night is associated with a higher risk of negative health outcomes like high blood pressure and heart disease."

"“Too little sleep is bad and too much sleep is bad,” Mark Lachs, co-chief of the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who wasn't involved in the study, told the Washington Post. “It is a Goldilocks kind of phenomenon.” The optimal amount of sleep is highly dependent on the individual, with some needing as few as six hours, and others as much as nine."

"A rare few - less than one percent of the population - thrive off of just four hours of sleep per night with no health consequences; scientists are still trying to understand why, with current research focusing on a mutation in a gene that modulates the production of orexin, a hormone that regulates sleep. (Whatever the cause, we're envious.)"

"In this latest work, the researchers analyzed biomedical data on 500,000 volunteers collected from another long-term study, the UK Biobank, with the goal of developing a biological aging clock for the body's organs. They examined data including self-reported sleep durations, MRI images of organs, and blood plasma and metabolomics data."

Read at Futurism