Lifestyle

Too much sleep is as bad for your memory as not getting enough, study finds



Most sleep experts recommend snoozing for between seven and eight hours per night, and we’re increasingly learning how getting more or less than that amount can have detrimental effects on our mental and physical health. 

Now, a new study from UCL has found that sleeping for less than seven hours or more than nine could negatively affect your memory and reaction time. 

The research, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, set out to explore the relationship between sleep and cognitive function and dementia by analysing genetic data from nearly 400,000 participants from UK Biobank and the International Genomics of Alzheimer’s Project.

The results of a pairs-matching visual memory test suggest that people who slept for less than seven hours a day made 5 per cent more mistakes per each hour less of sleep, while those who slept for more than nine hours made even more errors, 9 per cent per each additional hour of sleep.

Study lead author Albert Henry, of the UCL Institute of Cardiovascular Science, said: “Our study provides new evidence that both short and long sleep may have a negative impact on certain cognitive domains, such as visual memory and reaction time.”

Dr Victoria Garfield, senior author, added: “We conducted a large Mendelian randomization (MR) study to identify the potential causal role of sleep duration on multiple cognitive outcomes. This is the first time that we were able to assess a person’s lifelong sleep duration in relation to cognitive function, as opposed to only looking at how sleep is linked to these outcomes at only one point in time.

“We would recommend that most healthy adults follow the recommendation of seven to nine hours of sleep.”

Henry added: “Previous studies have also linked sleep problems with an increased risk of dementia. We found little evidence that sleep duration is associated with the risk of dementia in the present study, but more research is needed to explore this relationship.

“Overall, our study highlights the importance of sleep duration in relation to cognitive function. This suggests that improving sleep habits may be beneficial for cognitive health.”



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