What is your “sleeping age”? Oh, yeah. I'm the usual careless person. First I should explain to you (unless you already know) what is meant by “sleep age”. This is an estimate that roughly indicates a person's health-related age, based on their sleep quality.
I'll give you an example: if a person is 45 years old but sleeps poorly, their "sleeping age" is probably 58 years old. Not very well.
Why? While we sleep our brain "executes" a pre-established program. It “cleans” the memory, refreshes itself and restores the body. Heart rate and breathing also change during sleep. And changes in these parameters (hence changes in sleep quality) could be used as warning signs of a health problem.
A recently published study (you can find it at the bottom of the article) has attributed great importance to the quality of sleep.
The strongest predictor of mortality
Emmanuel Mignot and his team are currently working with scientists fromHarvard University to create a system capable of estimating the age of sleep, and with this also the mortality of a patient. Studies already underway on a total of 12.000 patients have provided the first interesting data. Each “file” analyzes a patient's sleep characteristics such as chin and leg movement, breathing and heart rate. Already planned studies on as many as 250.000 new files will help collect an impressive amount of data, and machine learning will do the rest.
“Our main finding from the data already analyzed was that sleep fragmentation (waking up multiple times during the night for less than a minute without remembering) is the strongest predictor of mortality,” Mignot says. “However, although we see a correlation, it is not yet clear how this circumstance contributes to mortality. The data, for example, is different from that of a person who realizes they have woken up, which happens during sleep disorders such as insomnia."
Shorten the age of sleep, lengthen the age of life
On this the researcher has very clear ideas, as well as an enviable common sense. There are very simple things we can do to improve our sleeping age: for example, expose yourself to sunlight for enough hours.
Or get regular exercise, but not too close to the time you go to sleep. Again, don't drink alcohol or caffeine after a certain time, and avoid heavy nighttime meals. It seems like an episode of Studio Aperto: all that's missing is "drink a lot and don't go out during the hottest hours".
Anyway, the study you can find it here.
I gave you the news.
Sleep on it.
