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Sleep is essential for our vitality and health, yet over a third of Americans are sleeping less than the CDC-recommended
seven hours each night. As we age, deterioration in sleep quantity and quality becomes even worse, with people over 65 especially prone to insomnia. Memory decline and dementia have been linked to age-related sleep disruption, and the sleep tech industry is booming in response to what is fast being acknowledged as a public health crisis.
With March being the month for sleep awareness and International Women’s Day, in this issue of
The Abstract we explore the dramatic impact sleep has on health, from calorie intake to how postpartum sleep deprivation ages women, and new insights that may help inform the development of more effective treatments for age-related sleep decline. We also explore how even mild cases of COVID-19 can age the brain and the effect that just one daily alcoholic drink has on brain volume.
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Getting enough sleep could burn an extra 270 calories a day
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Sleep more, eat less? A recent study published in
JAMA Internal Medicine showed that overweight study participants who extended their sleep from less than 6.5 hours a night to ~7.5 hours took in an average of 270 calories less per day than the control group, and exhibited a statistically significant reduction in weight. If the effects were sustained long term, the results of this study would predict a weight reduction of ~26.5 lbs over three years—just from sleeping 1.2 hours more a day. The results also suggest that extending sleep to even longer periods would result in greater success in weight loss. Reducing electronic use appeared to be a key intervention that helped with sleep extension among participants.
“We’ve shown that in real life, without making any other lifestyle changes, you can extend your sleep and eat fewer calories,” says lead researcher Dr. Esra Tasali, Director of the Sleep Research Center at the University of Chicago Medicine.
“This could really help people trying to lose weight.”
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The Expert’s Take:
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“The results make perfect biological sense. When we’re sleep-deprived, our body produces more ghrelin (the hunger hormone) and less leptin (a hormone that makes you feel full). This probably stems from evolutionary science. In the prehistoric era, tiredness was a signal to our brains that we were in danger. Our sleep-deprived bodies were incentivised to pile on calories, in case we needed to sprint away from a saber-tooth tiger.
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A sleep-deprived body also struggles to remove glucose from your circulating blood, studies show. In other words, tiredness doesn’t just make you hungrier – it also means the food you eat will make you fatter than if you ate the same food while you were well-rested.” -
The Telegraph
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Russell Foster, Ph.D.
Elysium Scientific Advisory Board member, professor and chair of circadian neuroscience, director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, and head of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology at the University of Oxford
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THIS MONTH
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What We’re Reading
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These are third-party articles about science that we find interesting but have no relationship to Elysium or any of our products. Elysium’s products are not intended to screen, diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
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This is why sleep gets worse with age
As we age, our sleep quality declines, predominantly through sleep fragmentation (less consolidated sleep with more awakenings), which prevents restorative sleep. Recent research in
Science shows that hyperexcitability of hypocretin neurons is a core mechanism of sleep fragmentation in aged mice. Hypocretin neurons normally fire during wakefulness and become inactive with sleep. Li
et al. report, however, that the threshold for arousal of these neurons is much lower in aged mice and thus, they fire more frequently, resulting in increased wakefulness. The results of this study may aid the development of new sleep medications that produce a more natural sleep architecture than traditional sedatives that reduce overall brain activity. (Medical Daily)
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Postpartum sleep deprivation is aging women faster
A recent study found that new mothers sleeping less than seven hours a night after giving birth were biologically three to seven years older than those getting more sleep. Researchers analyzed the DNA from blood samples from 33 women, six months after giving birth, to determine their biological or epigenetic age, which can differ from chronological age (discover your own biological age with
Index). Not only were sleep-deprived mothers aging faster, they also had shorter telomeres—protective ends on chromosomes. Shortening of telomeres has been associated with increased risk of cancer and early aging.
“The early months of postpartum sleep deprivation could have a lasting effect on physical health,” says study author Judith Carroll, Ph.D., UCLA's George F. Solomon Professor of Psychobiology.
“We found that with every hour of additional sleep, the mother's biological age was younger.” (UCLA)
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COVID-19 can age the brain by a decade
Even mild cases of COVID-19 could cause a reduction in global brain volume, equivalent to a decade of aging, according to new research published in
Nature. Scientists examined the MRI scans of 785 people aged 51-81, captured pre-pandemic and 38 months later, and found those who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 displayed greater tissue damage in the brain (including areas linked to smell) and global brain shrinkage compared to those who were uninfected. Changes were also associated with cognitive decline. It is unclear whether this damage is caused by the virus invading the brain, or is due to inflammation as a result of the virus.
“It is brain damage, but it is possible that it is reversible,” says lead author Gwenaëlle Douaud, Ph.D., associate professor of neurosciences at the University of Oxford.
“But it is still relatively scary because it was in mildly infected people.” (Axios)
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Just one drink a day can cause brain shrinkage
The CDC defines moderate drinking as one drink or less daily for women and two drinks or less daily for men, but a new study published in
Nature suggests that even one drink is associated with reduced global brain volume and changes in brain macrostructure and microstructure—and the damage gets exponentially worse the more you drink. By studying the MRI scans of more than 36,000 relatively healthy, middle-aged adults in the U.K., researchers found that just one unit of alcohol (for example, half a beer) was associated with half a year of brain aging, while four drinks a day was associated with over ten years of brain aging in both gray and white matter.
“There is some evidence that the effect of drinking on the brain is exponential,” says Remi Daviet, Ph.D., lead author and now an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“So, one additional drink in a day could have more of an impact than any of the previous drinks that day. That means that cutting back on that final drink of the night might have a big effect in terms of brain aging.” (Penn Today)
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