Waking up at night, even in middle age, can lead to memory problems later in life.
One study looked at people in their mid-30s to late 40s who wore trackers on their wrists to measure their sleep over six days and nights.
The researchers calculated how restless these people were at night based on the percentage of time they spent moving, indicating they were awake.
Those with the most disrupted sleep were more likely to perform poorly on a battery of tests about a decade later than those with the least disrupted sleep.
For example, people with the poorest sleep quality were more than twice as likely to score poorly on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment.
One study looked at people in their mid-30s to late 40s who wore trackers on their wrists to measure their sleep over six days and nights. The researchers calculated how restless these people were at night, based on the percentage of time they spent moving, suggesting they wake up
This important test of reasoning skills asks participants to memorize a list of words and, after a delay, perform mental arithmetic.
Experts suspect that people who wake up frequently, perhaps due to work stress or a noisy or bright sleeping environment, may be less able to clear potentially harmful proteins from their brains while they sleep.
Even in middle age, in your 30s and 40s, it can have an impact on thinking skills later in life.
The study, which involved 526 people, found that those who had the most interrupted sleep were almost 2.5 times more likely to perform poorly on tests of their word skills.
In these tests, they were asked to list as many words as possible that started with specific letters or belonged to a category such as animal names.
READ MORE: The secret to a happy life? SLEEP! According to research, going to bed just an hour later than usual is enough to make you feel unwell
Dr Yue Leng, who led the research at the University of California, San Francisco, said: “Our findings suggest that it is the quality, not the quantity, of sleep that is particularly important for cognitive health in middle age. .”
“If someone is waking up at night due to the stress of work, snoring a lot and possibly having sleep apnea that is making them restless, these things may need to be addressed.”
“They may be associated with poorer thinking skills and memory problems later in life.”
The study, published in the journal Neurology, also looked at how long people slept, but found no link between sleep duration and thinking skills.
The people the researchers analyzed took part in a previous study in which they wore a sleep tracker twice for three days in a row.
The two sleep measurements, taken between 2003 and 2005, were taken about a year apart to determine people’s average sleep quality, rather than as a one-off snapshot.
Disrupted sleep was assessed by the amount of time people spent moving during the night, including periods in which they stayed still for no more than a minute at a time.
The researchers divided people into three groups and found a significant difference between the third group with the worst sleep quality and the third group with the best sleep quality.
The worst sleepers were almost three times more likely to perform poorly on a reasoning test in which they had to remember which numbers belonged to a series of symbols.
The poorer performance in the tests was found after accounting for factors other than sleep that may play a role, including people’s age and education, as well as medical conditions that can affect the brain, such as high blood pressure.
However, the study used wrist-worn trackers rather than the gold standard sleep trackers that measure brain activity.
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Crystal Leahy is an author and health journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a background in health and wellness, Crystal has a passion for helping people live their best lives through healthy habits and lifestyles.
