Sleep quality is well established to decline with age and age-related disease. A sizable medical and supporting industry is devoted to attempts to improve sleep quality via what are essentially compensatory approaches to intervention. As researchers note here, the evidence to hand does not demonstrate that reduced sleep quality causes an acceleration in the pace of aging. That the evidence for poor sleep to cause accelerated aging is very mixed suggests a complex relationship between this dysfunction and the broader scope of aging, in which only some of the circumstances and mechanisms associated with poor sleep may accelerate aging. Otherwise it is likely a downstream consequence of aging.
Sleep gets worse with age and is correlated with risk for disease and mortality. The possibility that poor sleep causes aging to accelerate has prompted interest in improving sleep to slow aging and prevent disease. However, the existing evidence on the link between poor sleep and accelerated aging is unclear. Here, we tested for correlation and causation between poor sleep and accelerated aging using five independent datasets of adults (total N > 64,000).
We found strong evidence for a correlation between poor sleep and fast aging that is consistent across young, middle, and late adulthood and across aging biomarkers derived from different tissues and modalities. We found that this correlation is robust to the influence of chronic disease burden, but not to the influence of shared genetic and early environmental factors among twins. Finally, we found mixed evidence for a causal influence of poor sleep on accelerated aging using Mendelian randomization. Our findings indicate that the correlation between poor sleep and accelerated aging is highly robust; however, the claim that poor sleep causes aging to accelerate is not consistently supported.
