The impact of sleep on health and aging: what do experts say?

Experts emphasize that chronic difficulties falling asleep or staying asleep can lead to serious health consequences. Therefore, it is not worth underestimating sleep problems.

Blue light a big problem?

Using smartphones, computers or TVs in the evening may negatively affect the quality of our sleep, experts warn. The so-called culprit is blue light, i.e. radiation with the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum.

As explained by neurologist Dr. Hab. n. med. Jakub Antczak in an open lecture on Radio RMF24, it is blue light that most inhibits the secretion of melatonin - the hormone responsible for regulating the circadian rhythm. As a result, our "biological clock" may become disturbed and falling asleep becomes more difficult.

Using thorough sleep studies, blue light has been recorded to delay sleep by up to an hour. Exposure to light for several minutes causes a decrease in melatonin secretion, and the effect on sleep is longer - it delays falling asleep and reduces the amount of slow-wave sleep, which is the most regenerative - said the neurologist.

It is recommended to limit exposure to screens an hour before bedtime and use night modes in electronic devices.

Too short and too long sleep

Another important issue is sleep duration. A new publication by researchers from Columbia University indicates that sleep duration is not only associated with the aging of the brain, but also other parts of the body, reported the journal Nature.

Its authors used data from approximately half a million people. Using 23 so-called biological aging clocks assessed the aging rate of 17 systems and organs. Biological clocks are computational models that, based on various data, estimate whether a given organ is biologically younger or older than its chronological age. This study was based on, among others, on the results of imaging tests and the concentrations of various molecules in the blood.

Then, the researchers compared the biological age of individual organs with the duration of sleep declared by the participants. It turned out that a similar relationship emerged in almost all body systems: signs of accelerated aging were more common both in people who slept less than six hours a night and in those who slept more than eight hours. The slowest biological aging was observed with 6.4-7.8 hours of sleep.

This relationship concerned, among others, brain, heart, lungs and immune system. This extends previous findings that focused primarily on the relationship between sleep and brain aging.

Sleep duration and diseases

The authors also observed a relationship between sleep duration and a number of diseases. Sleeping less than six hours a day was associated with, among other things, with depressive episodes, anxiety disorders, obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, ischemic heart disease and cardiac arrhythmias.

In turn, both short and long sleep were associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and several digestive diseases, including gastritis and gastroesophageal reflux.