Health News
A team of researchers at University College London explored why people sleep the least from their early 30s to 50s. The study is published in Nature Communications.
The Study
The researchers invited 730,187 participants from over 63 countries to play the Sea Hero Quest mobile game. The tasks assigned to the participants helped survey how sleep patterns change across the lifespan, different ages and sleep durations across countries, spatial navigational abilities, etc.
The Findings
The results revealed that aging and sleep are inversely related. People sleep less in mid-adulthood due to the demands of childcare and working life. However, the patterns of sleep-needs change as people approach old age and these increase for the better.
One of the lead researchers, Professor Spiers, elaborated: “Previous studies have found associations between age and sleep duration, but ours is the first large study to identify 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.”
To Know More You May Refer To
Coutrot, A., Lazar, A.S., Richards, M. et al. Reported sleep duration reveals segmentation of the adult life-course into three phases. Nat Commun 13, 7697 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-34624-8