Worried about your cognitive health? If you find the number of hours you sleep each night has changed over time, you may want to be. The May 1, 2011 issue of the journal Sleep includes study results that describe how changes in the duration of sleep over a five-year period can affect cognitive function in later life. This isn’t about too little sleep, it’s about the change in duration of sleep. So, men and women who begin sleeping more or less than six to eight hours each night may experience an accelerated cognitive decline that is equivalent to four to seven years of aging. Whoa!
The age range of the study participants was 45 to 69 years of age. Results from the study show that the sleep duration of men and women at a five-year follow-up had increased from seven to eight hours per night was associated with lower scores on five of six cognitive function test as compared to those men and women whose sleep duration was unchanged. Believe it or not, for men and women whose sleep duration decreased from six, seven or eight hours per night, the change in sleep duration was associated with lower scores on three of the six cognitive function tests.
According to Jane Ferrie, PhD, study author and senior fellow in the University College London Medical School Department of Epidemiology and Public Heath in the UK, “The main result to come out of our study was that adverse changes in sleep duration appear to be associated with poor cognitive function in later middle-age.”
There is good news. Researchers also found that, in women, sleep duration of seven hours of sleep per night was associated with the highest score for every cognitive measure, followed closely by six hours of nightly sleep. Among men, cognitive function was similar for those who reported sleeping six, seven or eight hours; only short and long sleep durations of less than six hours or more than eight hours appeared to be associated with lower scores.
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