Ageing is a process no one can halt, and the signs of it emerge naturally with each passing year.
But a very common habit can bring on premature ageing.
This emerged in a medical study conducted in the United States.
Research at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center found that sleeping too little or too much increases the risk of premature ageing.
According to the study, sleeping for very short or very long durations causes the age of the brain, lungs, heart, immune system and other organs to increase rapidly, while the risk of multiple diseases also rises.
Medical specialists frequently analyse factors associated with ageing to determine how quickly or slowly a person’s biological age is advancing.
While every person’s age is conventionally determined by date of birth — the chronological age — there is also, in medical terms, a biological age, which corresponds to the functional age of the body and mind.
Genes, lifestyle and other elements affect this biological age, and the higher it is, the greater the risk of various diseases.
The study used tools that analyse the internal clocks of bodily organs, employing machine learning technology and biological information to estimate the factors associated with ageing.
Researchers developed ageing clocks for each bodily organ, with the objective of obtaining more detailed information about a person’s health.
They then compared the sleep habits of 500,000 people against the biological age of different organs.
The study found that short sleep — less than six hours — and very long sleep — more than eight hours — cause biological age to increase rapidly.
It found that sleeping between 6.4 and 7.8 hours daily reduces the pace at which biological age increases.
The research stated that sleep duration is not in itself the cause of accelerating or slowing the pace of ageing; rather, very short or very long sleep is an indicator of poor bodily health.
According to the study, the findings also demonstrate that a strong relationship exists between sleep, the brain and the body as a whole.
A significant relationship exists between short sleep and symptoms of depression as well as anxiety, while relationships also exist with obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.
Both short and long sleep duration increase the risk of chronic lung disease and asthma, and both can result in serious digestive disorders.
Researchers said this connection between the brain and the body demonstrates that sleep duration is very strongly linked to the entire body.
They added that earlier research had identified a relationship between sleep and ageing, but that their study has produced further findings, establishing that very short or very long sleep rapidly increases the age of every organ in the body.
The researchers’ own caution on interpretation is the most important element of the findings. Long sleep in particular is widely understood in the literature as more likely to be a signal of existing illness — undiagnosed conditions, chronic inflammation or disordered sleep architecture — than a cause of harm in itself.
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