People sleep less in mid-adulthood than they do in early and late maturity, finds a recent study led by UCL, University of East Anglia and University of Lyon researchers.
Sleep duration declines in early maturity until age 33, after which picks up again at age 53, in line with the findings published in Nature Communications.
The study, involving 730,187 participants spread over 63 countries, revealed how sleep patterns change across the lifespan, and the way they differ between countries.
Study participants were playing the Sea Hero Quest mobile game, a citizen science enterprise designed for neuroscience research, created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL, UEA and game developers Glitchers. Designed to assist Alzheimer’s research by shedding light on differences in spatial navigational abilities, over 4 million people have played Sea Hero Quest, contributing to quite a few studies across the project as a complete.
Along with completing tasks testing navigational ability, anyone playing the sport is asked to reply questions on demographic characteristics in addition to other questions that could be useful to neuroscience research, similar to on sleep patterns.
The researchers, led by Professor Hugo Spiers (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) and Dr Antoine Coutrot (CNRS, University of Lyon) found that across the study sample, people sleep a mean of seven.01 hours per night, with women sleeping 7.5 minutes longer than men on average. They found that the youngest participants within the sample (minimum age 19) slept essentially the most, and sleep duration declined throughout people’s 20s and early 30s before plateauing until their early 50s and increasing again. The pattern, including the newly-identified key time points of age 33 when declining sleep plateaus and 53 for sleep to extend again, was the identical for men and girls, and across countries and education levels.
The researchers say the decline in sleep during mid-life could also be resulting from demands of childcare and dealing life.
Previous studies have found associations between age and sleep duration, but ours is the primary large study to discover these three distinct phases across the life course. We found that across the globe, people sleep less during mid-adulthood, but average sleep duration varies between regions and between countries.”
Professor Hugo Spiers, UCL Psychology & Language Sciences
Individuals who report sleeping essentially the most are in Eastern European countries similar to Albania, Slovakia, Romania and the Czech Republic, reporting 20-40 minutes extra sleep per night and the least in South East Asian countries including the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. People in the UK reported sleeping barely lower than the common. People tended to sleep a bit less in countries closer to the equator.
The researchers found that navigational ability was unaffected by sleep duration for a lot of the sample, aside from amongst older adults (aged 54-70) whose optimal sleep duration was seven hours, although they caution that the findings amongst older adults is perhaps impacted by underlying health conditions.
Source:
University College London
Journal reference:
Coutrot, A., et al. (2022) Reported sleep duration reveals segmentation of the adult life-course into three phases. Nature Communications. doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34624-8.