Having trouble nodding off ? It may be your parents’ fault

IF YOU struggle to get a full eight hours at night, your parents could be to blame, as suffering from sleep problems could be genetic, a study suggests.

Scientists at the University of Exeter have identified 76 new genes that are associated with sleep duration, after examining nearly 500,000 Britons.

While carrying a single gene variant influenced the average amount of sleep by only a minute, participants carrying the largest number of duration-increasing variants reported an average of 22 more minutes of sleep, compared with those with the fewest.

Previous studies have shown that regularly getting adequate sleep – between seven and eight hours a night – is important to health. But insufficient sleep of six hours or fewer, and excessive sleep – nine hours or more – have been linked to significant health issues.

Family studies have suggested that up to 40 per cent of variation in sleep duration may be inherited and genetic studies have associated variants in two gene regions with sleep duration.

Scientists examined genetic data from more than 446,000 participants in the UK Biobank who self-reported the amount of sleep they typically had.

They identified 78 gene regions – including two previously discovered – as associated with sleep duration.

Dr Samuel Jones, who was co-lead author of the study, said: “Finding 78 areas of the genome that influence habitual sleep duration represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of the mechanisms behind why some people need more sleep than others.

“As part of a wider body of work, our discoveries have the potential to aid the discovery of new treatments for sleep and sleep-related disorders.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.