A new study of more than 27,000 people over several years suggests poor sleep health may cause your brain to age faster and create a “brain-age gap”. Let’s say if you’re 40, but your brain age is 50 years old. That is a 10-year gap. The higher the brain age gap, the higher the mortality in the patient. It can also lead to a higher risk of cognitive decline, aka the development of dementia or other neurodegenerative disorders. The researchers picked certain inflammatory markers, and they would do blood work and things like that. So, if there is an elevation in these markers, inflammation does play a role in about 10 percent of the cases. So, that’s what contributes to that overall brain age gap. The easiest one is to be screened for obstructive sleep apnea. That can improve your sleep duration. That can improve snoring, daytime sleepiness. It can even improve sleep maintenance insomnia, which means your ability to stay asleep at night once you have fallen asleep. And those are four of the metrics that they used to define healthy sleep. If you already know that you’re regarding schedules and things like that, it’s very easy to de-prioritize sleep. Just make sure you’re prioritizing sleep now that we know a lot of things can come from poor sleep. That’s one of the things that can really help. So, if someone has trouble sleeping and we know that it is situational due to stress, due to certain life events, yes, we do help to try to help that patient obtain better sleep in certain ways. However, we know that this is more of a temporary cause of poor sleep.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!A New Study Suggests Poor Sleep Health Can Make Your Brain Age Faster
