Sleeping too much (and too little) associated with premature aging

Getting too little sleep has long been associated with poor health, but new research suggests that sleeping too much may also be linked to accelerated aging throughout the body.

The study, recently published in the journal Nature, found that both short sleep — defined as fewer than six hours per night — and long sleep — more than eight hours nightly — were associated with faster biological aging in several organ systems, including the brain, heart, lungs and immune system. The findings were also connected with a broad range of diseases.

The study was led by Junhao Wen, Ph.D., assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.

He and his team used “digital aging clocks,” which are machine learning algorithms that project potential future health trends using the biological data of a patient, such as proteins from a minimally invasive blood test, medical images and organ-specific proteins.

Wen’s team used data that came from half a million participants listed in the UK Biobank and created 23 clocks across 17 organ systems. The researchers then compared each participant’s self-reported sleep duration with the biological age estimates produced by the clocks. Their analysis revealed a clear U-shaped association between sleep duration and aging across the body.

Unlike chronological age, which measures the number of years a person has lived, biological age attempts to estimate how quickly the body’s tissues and organs are aging. Researchers increasingly use aging clocks to predict disease risk, mortality and overall health outcomes.

“In the liver, for example, we have an aging clock built with protein data, an aging clock of metabolic data, and an aging clock of imaging data,” Wen said in a news release. “This allows us to see whether sleep is distinctively associated with aging clocks derived from multiple omics and molecular layers.”

Researchers stressed that the study does not prove that sleep duration directly causes premature aging. Instead, abnormal sleep patterns may act as indicators of broader health problems or disruptions in the body’s systems.

The findings also linked sleep duration with a variety of diseases. Short sleep was associated with depressive episodes, anxiety disorders, obesity, hypertension, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Both short and long sleep were associated with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma and gastrointestinal conditions such as gastritis and gastroesophageal reflux disease.

The researchers believe the findings highlight how deeply sleep is connected to the body’s overall physiological function, including metabolism and immune regulation.

“This is the first study, to our knowledge, that reveals a broad agreement between sleep duration and multi-organ, multi-omics aging clocks and links these signatures to systemic disease outcomes and mortality risk,” Wen and his co-authors wrote in the study. “Our results underscore the systemic biological adverse associations of disturbed sleep and provide a compelling framework for more targeted and thoughtful attention to sleep disturbance as a potential signal of emerging health issues and a partner in the quest to promote healthy aging, reduce disease risk and extend lifespan.”