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Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

cnn.com

11–20 of 173 posts

Re: Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

#12
post #11

More accurately, middle aged people who get less than 6 hours of sleep a night are 30% more likely to get dementia. I'd expect that people who get less than 6 hours of sleep are also more stressed and less health concious though.

This guy infers. This seems like a tough study given the correlation factors.

Re: Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

#15

So, anyone with kids is probably going to have dementia?

So mid-life in this study is 50 to 60, if you have kids at 35 by that age your kids are probably not affecting your sleep schedule. I coudn't find out if the study found a correlation with younger patients sleeping 6 vs. 7 hours.

Also they are at 30% higher risk of something that is already kinda unlikely for most of the population if you follow a healthy lifestyle. Most of the research points towards vascular disease being the most important indicator of heightened dementia risk on an otherwise healthy population, and this study only controlled for severe vascular disease like having had a stroke or infarction.

Re: Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

#16
I always wonder about the direction of causality (if any) in these studies.

I’m fortunate to mostly live without an alarm clock. I naturally get up before any scheduled activities, only early morning flights (previously) or EU time zone meetings require an alarm. Even without an alarm, I typically wake up feeling fully refreshed after 5-6 hours, rarely more than 7.

If I end up with dementia (family history indicates likely), is the same root cause of dementia causing the 5-6 hours of sleep now, the other way around, or neither?

Re: Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

#18
In contrast, a quasi-causal analysis (via Mendelian randomization) found no causal effect of sleep duration on Alzheimer's risk.

> There was little evidence to support associations of increased sleep duration with ... Alzheimer's disease risk [OR = 0.89 (95% CI = 0.67-1.18); P = 0.41].

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31062029/

Re: Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

#19
post #14

So, anyone with kids is probably going to have dementia?

Usually parents can't sleep well only for a year at most, even 6 months old children are sleeping whole nights.

That's just half of the picture. My kids are older but they have a talent to get up at 6 in the morning on weekends. And need to get up at similar times for school during the week.

Re: Association of sleep duration in middle and old age with incidence of dementia

#20

In contrast, a quasi-causal analysis (via Mendelian randomization) found no causal effect of sleep duration on Alzheimer's risk. > There was little evidence to support associations of increased sleep duration with ... Alzheimer's disease risk [OR = 0.89 (95% CI = 0.67-1.18); P = 0.41]. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31062029/

There are other forms of dementia than Alzheimer's.
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