Are you over forty and wondering how magical sleep each night can be? A new study arrives at an answer.
It turns out that seven hours of sleep per night might be the perfect amount to keep your brain healthy if you’re middle-aged or older webmd
“Getting a good night’s sleep is important throughout life, but especially as we age. Finding ways to improve sleep for older adults can be critical to helping them maintain mental health and well-being and avoid cognitive decline, especially for patients,” she said. Study author Barbara Sahakian, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge in England.
For the study, researchers analyzed data on the sleep patterns, mental health and well-being of nearly 500,000 British adults, aged 38 to 73, who completed a series of reasoning tests. Brain imaging and genetic data were available for nearly 40,000 participants.
Seven hours of sleep each night was ideal for cognitive functioning (“thinking”) and mental health, according to the study published April 28 in the journal Journal of Neuroscience. Nature Aging .
Participants who got too little or too much sleep performed worse on tests measuring processing speed, visual attention, memory and problem-solving skills. They were also more likely to have symptoms of anxiety and depression, and to have a general deterioration in mental status.
The study also found a link between the amount of sleep and differences in the structure of brain regions involved in cognitive processing and memory, with larger changes associated with sleeping less or more than seven hours a night.
The findings suggest that too little or too much sleep may be a risk factor for mental decline with age.
Previous studies have reported a link between sleep and risk of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia.
“While we cannot definitively say that too little or too much sleep causes cognitive problems, our analysis looking at individuals over a longer period of time appears to support this idea,” said study author Jianfengfeng, a professor at Fudan University in China, He said in a press release for Cambridge. “But the reasons older adults experience poor sleep appears to be complex, influenced by a combination of genetic makeup and the structure of our brains.”