Longer REM sleep linked to lower risk of 83 diseases — ScienceDaily

In the United Kingdom, an analysis of data from 95,559 participants in the UK Biobank project found an association between longer REM sleep duration and a lower risk of developing 83 diseases, including dementia, heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease. As ScienceDaily reports, the study was published on September 17 in the journal PLOS Medicine.

How the study was conducted

Participants wore accelerometers on their wrists for seven days and nights. Scientists used a deep-learning algorithm to estimate the duration of REM, deep, and light sleep stages, total sleep duration, wake time after sleep onset, as well as night-to-night irregularity in sleep patterns.

Participants’ health was monitored for an average of 8.9 years. Medical records made it possible to examine associations between sleep characteristics and more than 1,000 diseases. The authors identified 156 statistically significant associations between sleep parameters and new cases of diseases after Bonferroni correction.

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What associations were found

Longer REM sleep duration within an interquartile range of 47.6 minutes was associated with a lower risk of heart failure, dementia, and Parkinson’s disease. Longer deep sleep duration was linked to a lower risk of seven conditions, including type 2 diabetes and major depressive disorder.

Sleep irregularity and longer wake time after sleep onset, by contrast, were associated with a higher risk of a number of conditions, including anxiety disorders and substance use-related disorders. For many diseases, the lowest risk was associated with total sleep duration of six to eight hours per day. Sleeping less than five hours per day was associated with an increased risk of 37 conditions.

The authors emphasized that this was an observational study and therefore does not establish a causal relationship between sleep parameters and disease risk.