This is the secret to keeping the brain young

Our brain is comparable to a muscle: the better we take care of it, the better it will function over time. Although aging is inevitable, certain habits can speed it up or slow it down. Sleep well, stimulate the mind, exercise and maintain a healthy diet They are strategies to preserve brain health.

A team from the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) has investigated how sleep quality is related to age “biological” of the brain, compared to chronological age. People who sleep poorly are more likely than others to have brains that look older than they really are, according to work by the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), published in the journal BioMedicine. Increased inflammation in the body could partly explain this association.

Study with more than 27,500 people

Data were analyzed from 27,500 middle-aged and older adults from the UK Biobank. These participants underwent brain MRIs, and using machine learning techniques, the researchers estimated a “brain age” based on more than a thousand brain features extracted from the images.

Participants answered questions about five aspects of sleep: chronotype (being a morning person or night person), sleep duration, insomnia, snoring and daytime sleepiness. They were classified into three categories: healthy sleep (4 points), intermediate (2–3 points) or deficient (1 point).

“The difference between brain age and chronological age widened by approximately six months for each point decrease in the healthy sleep score,” he explains. Abigail Doveresearcher at the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society at the Karolinska Institutet, who led the study. “People with poor sleep had brains that, on average, looked a year older than their actual age”.

To explore possible mechanisms, the authors also examined markers of body inflammation. They found that inflammation could explain more of the 10% of the relationship between bad sleep and “accelerated” brain aging.

“Our findings provide evidence that lack of sleep may contribute to accelerated brain aging and point to inflammation as one of the underlying mechanisms,” he adds. Abigail Dove. “Since sleep is changeable, it is possible to prevent accelerated brain aging and even cognitive decline through healthier sleep”

Other possible mechanisms that could explain the association are the negative effects on the immune system. brain waste removalwhich is mainly active during sleep, or that lack of sleep affects cardiovascular health, which in turn can have a negative impact on the brain.

The participants of the UK Biobank They are in better health than the general UK population, which could limit the generalisability of the findings. Another limitation of the study is that the results are based on the self-declared dream.