Older, wiser and so tired
New research shows sleep deprivation is a common side-effect of aging
It’s a myth that people need less sleep as they get older — they just struggle to get it, new research suggests.
A review by the University of California found that the aging process restricts the ability to produce deep restorative sleep, leaving middle-aged and older people sleep-deprived — and at greater risk of illnesses, including Alzheimer’s disease.
It’s often said that people need less sleep after they hit middle age, with many older people rising earlier. But the research found that, in fact, the quality of sleep older people received was dramatically lower, with brain scans showing disrupted electrical patterns and changes that are associated with sleep deprivation. As the brain ages, the neurons and circuits in the area that regulate sleep slowly degrade, resulting in a decreased amount of deep sleep, experts said.
The lack of such non-REM (dreamless) sleep is associated with memory and cognition, and linked to conditions including Alzheimer’s and cancer.
“Sleep changes with aging, but it doesn’t just change with aging. It can also start to explain aging itself,” said co-author Matthew Walker, who leads the sleep and neuroimaging laboratory at the University of California in Berkeley.
The review examined whether older people needed less sleep, as had long been argued, or whether they were actually unable to generate sleep that they badly needed.
It concluded that sleep deprivation is a common side-effect of aging.
“The evidence seems to favour one side — older adults do not have a reduced sleep need, but instead, an impaired ability to generate sleep,” Walker said.
Changes in sleep quality start as early as the mid-30s, well before participants noticed a shift to an “early-to-bed-early-to-rise” schedule or reported waking more often in the night. The problems are worse in men. Those struggling with sleep problems should follow standard “sleep hygiene” advice, researchers said.
This included avoiding coffee from late afternoon, cutting out alcohol, and keeping a regular sleep diary. But, they said, none of the measures could stop the impact of age-related sleep changes, warning against reliance on sleeping pills, which sedate brains, rather than restoring youthful sleep patterns. Walker said.
“Every one of the major diseases that are killing us in first-world nations, from diabetes to obesity to Alzheimer’s disease to cancer, all of those things now have strong causal links to a lack of sleep. And all of those diseases significantly increase in likelihood the older that we get,” he said.
“We need to recognize the causal contribution of sleep disruption in the physical and mental deterioration that underlies aging and dementia.”