Abstract:Purpose of Review
Sleep habits, sleep physiology, and sleep disorders change with increasing age. However, there is a longstanding debate regarding whether older adults need sleep to maintain health and daily functioning (reduced-sleep-need view). An alternative possibility is that all older adults need sleep, but that many older adults have lost the ability to obtain restorative sleep (reduced-sleep-ability view). Prior research using behavioral and polysomnography outcomes has not definitively disentangled t… Show more
“…However, arguments against this interpretation are that shorter sleep in older age may be due to desensitization to a homeostatic sleep drive, that less subjective sleepiness could be due to re-normalization of the subjective feeling of tiredness over time, and that older adults also perform worse on at least some cognitive tasks after sleep deprivation [3]. Thus, the debate on whether shorter sleep duration in aging is a result of less sleep needs or lower sleeping abilities is not settled [60].…”
BackgroundPoor sleep is associated with multiple age-related neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric conditions. The hippocampus plays a special role in sleep and sleep-dependent cognition, and accelerated hippocampal atrophy is typically seen with higher age. Hence, it is critical to establish how the relationship between sleep and hippocampal volume loss unfolds across the adult lifespan.MethodsSelf-reported sleep measures and MRI-derived hippocampal volumes were obtained from 3105 cognitively normal participants (18-90 years) from major European brain studies in the Lifebrain consortium. Hippocampal volume change was estimated from 5116 MRIs from 1299 participants, covering up to 11 years. Cross-sectional analyses were repeated in a sample of 21390 participants from the UK Biobank.ResultsThe relationship between self-reported sleep and age differed across sleep items. Sleep duration, efficiency, problems, and use of medication worsened monotonously with age, whereas subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, and daytime tiredness improved. Women reported worse sleep in general than men, but the relationship to age was similar. No cross-sectional sleep – hippocampal volume relationships was found. However, worse sleep quality, efficiency, problems, and daytime tiredness were related to greater hippocampal volume loss over time, with high scorers showing on average 0.22% greater annual loss than low scorers. Simulations showed that longitudinal effects were too small to be detected as age-interactions in cross-sectional analyses.ConclusionsWorse self-reported sleep is associated with higher rates of hippocampal decline across the adult lifespan. This suggests that sleep is relevant to understand individual differences in hippocampal atrophy, but limited effect sizes call for cautious interpretation.
“…However, arguments against this interpretation are that shorter sleep in older age may be due to desensitization to a homeostatic sleep drive, that less subjective sleepiness could be due to re-normalization of the subjective feeling of tiredness over time, and that older adults also perform worse on at least some cognitive tasks after sleep deprivation [3]. Thus, the debate on whether shorter sleep duration in aging is a result of less sleep needs or lower sleeping abilities is not settled [60].…”
BackgroundPoor sleep is associated with multiple age-related neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric conditions. The hippocampus plays a special role in sleep and sleep-dependent cognition, and accelerated hippocampal atrophy is typically seen with higher age. Hence, it is critical to establish how the relationship between sleep and hippocampal volume loss unfolds across the adult lifespan.MethodsSelf-reported sleep measures and MRI-derived hippocampal volumes were obtained from 3105 cognitively normal participants (18-90 years) from major European brain studies in the Lifebrain consortium. Hippocampal volume change was estimated from 5116 MRIs from 1299 participants, covering up to 11 years. Cross-sectional analyses were repeated in a sample of 21390 participants from the UK Biobank.ResultsThe relationship between self-reported sleep and age differed across sleep items. Sleep duration, efficiency, problems, and use of medication worsened monotonously with age, whereas subjective sleep quality, sleep latency, and daytime tiredness improved. Women reported worse sleep in general than men, but the relationship to age was similar. No cross-sectional sleep – hippocampal volume relationships was found. However, worse sleep quality, efficiency, problems, and daytime tiredness were related to greater hippocampal volume loss over time, with high scorers showing on average 0.22% greater annual loss than low scorers. Simulations showed that longitudinal effects were too small to be detected as age-interactions in cross-sectional analyses.ConclusionsWorse self-reported sleep is associated with higher rates of hippocampal decline across the adult lifespan. This suggests that sleep is relevant to understand individual differences in hippocampal atrophy, but limited effect sizes call for cautious interpretation.
“…Sleep deprivation, however, can hinder the ability to cope with emotional challenges and makes us more sensitive to painful emotional events (Vandekerckhove & Cluydts, ). The prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that regulates emotions, has been shown to be particularly susceptible to sleep loss (Scullin, ). In other words, the effects of sleep loss are manifold, and cutting back on sleep impairs many basic processes that are foundational for academic performance.In sleep‐deprived individuals, positron emission tomography (PET) scans show significant declines in activity within the prefrontal cortex as well as other areas associated with executive control and emotional processing, including the thalamus and parietal regions (Thomas et al, ).…”
Sleep is critical to physical health, mental well-being, attention, and creativity. During the week of final exams, however, fewer than 10% of undergraduate students maintain the recommended average of 8 hours/night (or even the recommended minimum of 7 hours/night). For students completing multifaceted projects in studio-based majors (e.g., interior design, architecture, graphic design, studio art), anecdotal and questionnaire data suggest that the end-of-semester reduction in sleep duration may be even worse. One potential solution is to offer students an incentive to maintain healthy sleep durations. We offered interior design students, who were enrolled in a freshman-level graphics studio course, an optional extra credit incentive to maintain optimal sleep durations for five nights leading up to the due date of their final project. If participants maintained an average sleep duration of ≥8.0 hours for five nights, they would earn extra credit. By contrast, if they slept an average of 7.0-7.9 hours, there would be no grade change, and if they slept an average of ≤6.9 hours, they were instructed that they would lose points (no points were actually deducted). Of the 27 students enrolled in the course, 22 students attempted the challenge (81.5%), and we monitored their sleep duration objectively using wristband actigraphy devices. We compared their sleep duration to that of a group of 22 nonincentivized students enrolled in the same program. In the nonincentivized comparison group, very few students averaged 8 hours (9%) or even 7 hours (14%) of sleep per night. In dramatic contrast, the 8-hour challenge increased the percentage of 8-and 7-hour sleepers to 59% and 86%, respectively. Participants who took the 8-hour challenge slept an average of 98 minutes more each night than nonincentivized students and 82 minutes more than they self-reported to sleeping during the semester. The substantial increase in nightly sleep duration did not come at a cost to project performance. Individuals who opted in to the sleep challenge performed as well on the final project as students who did not opt in, and students who showed more consistent sleep (i.e., fewer nights of poor sleep followed by rebound sleep) performed better than students who showed inconsistent sleep. Thus, even during highly stressful "deadline" weeks, students can maintain healthy sleeping patterns without exacting a cost on their project performance.Despite an abundance of data that confirm the importance of sleep to cognition and health, many students continue to engage in irregular and restricted sleep. Such poor sleep habits are JOURNAL OF INTERIOR DESIGN 85
“…Good quality sleep is one lifestyle factor which is a pillar of healthy cognitive aging (2)(3)(4). Sleep is critical for the maintenance of cognitive function and for brain function (5)(6)(7).…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Sleep is critical for the maintenance of cognitive function and for brain function (5)(6)(7). While the importance of sleep for cognitive health does not change with age (2), there are changes in sleep which occur as a normal part of the aging process -both in terms of decreased quality and quantity (8,9). However, more than half of adults over 65 years of age report at least one chronic sleep complaint-the most common being the inability to stay asleep at night (10).…”
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