A recent study published on September 17 in PLOS Medicine has found that greater amounts of REM and deep sleep are associated with a lower risk of 83 diseases. The research, led by Shengzhi Sun from Capital Medical University in China, analyzed data from 95,559 participants in the UK Biobank who wore wrist accelerometers to track their sleep over seven days and nights.
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The study indicates that those who experience more REM sleep—averaging 47.6 minutes—show a significantly decreased risk for various conditions, such as heart failure (hazard ratio 0.74), dementia (hazard ratio 0.54), and Parkinson’s disease (hazard ratio 0.20). Increased deep sleep also correlated with a lower risk of seven conditions, including type 2 diabetes and major depressive disorder.
Conversely, greater sleep irregularity and increased wakefulness after sleep onset were associated with heightened risks for conditions like anxiety and substance use disorders. The total duration of sleep was found to have a non-linear relationship with disease risk, with the optimal sleep window being between six to eight hours. Individuals sleeping less than five hours faced increased vulnerability to 37 different conditions.
Despite these findings, the authors caution that the observational nature of the study limits the ability to conclusively establish a causal link between sleep patterns and disease risk. They emphasize that maintaining a sleep duration of six to eight hours could be beneficial for health, particularly for middle-aged and older adults due to favorable distributions of sleep stages.
The research identified 156 significant associations between sleep patterns and the emergence of diseases. Notably, 69 of these disease phenotypes exhibited their minimum-risk duration concentrated within the six to eight-hour sleep window.
Funding for this study was provided by several Chinese scientific foundations, which had no role in the design, data collection, analysis, or publication of these findings.