Study Links REM Sleep With Lower Risk of 83 Diseases

More REM Sleep Linked With Lower Risk of 83 Diseases in Large UK Biobank Study

A large study involving more than 95,000 people has found associations between sleep patterns and the risk of developing a wide range of diseases.

Published in PLOS Medicine, the research analysed wrist-worn accelerometer data from 95,559 UK Biobank participants and examined sleep stages, sleep duration, sleep irregularity and periods of wakefulness after falling asleep.

Researchers followed participants for a median of 8.9 years and analysed associations between sleep characteristics and 1,049 health outcomes.

The study found that higher amounts of rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep were associated with lower risks of 83 diseases across 12 categories.

The associations included cardiovascular and neurological conditions. Higher REM sleep was associated with lower risks of heart failure, atrial fibrillation, ischemic heart disease, parkinsonism, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Greater amounts of deep sleep were also associated with lower risks of seven diseases, including type 2 diabetes, major depressive disorder, sleep apnea and Parkinson’s disease.

Sleep duration also emerged as an important factor.

Researchers found that the minimum-risk duration for many of the disease outcomes was concentrated in the 6–8 hour range.

Participants who slept for less than five hours showed the broadest range of adverse associations compared with people sleeping six to eight hours.

The study found that people sleeping outside the six-to-eight-hour range had associations with higher risk for 55 incident diseases after false-discovery-rate correction.

However, the findings should not be interpreted as proof that increasing REM sleep directly prevents disease.

The researchers specifically identified the observational design as a limitation. Because the study observes associations rather than assigning people to different sleep patterns, it cannot establish that sleep characteristics directly cause or prevent the diseases studied.

Other factors may contribute to both sleep patterns and health outcomes.

The researchers used objective measurements from wearable accelerometers rather than relying solely on participants’ descriptions of their sleep. The analysis included sleep stages such as REM, N1, N2 and N3, as well as sleep irregularity and wakefulness after sleep onset.

The findings add to a growing body of research examining sleep as an important component of long-term health.

Rather than focusing only on the number of hours people spend in bed, the study highlights the possible importance of sleep architecture, including the amount of time spent in different sleep stages.

For readers, the main takeaway is that both sleep duration and sleep quality are being investigated as potential markers of health.

The researchers concluded that maintaining six to eight hours of sleep was associated with more favourable sleep patterns and lower disease risk in their study population.

Further research will be needed to determine the mechanisms behind these relationships and whether changing sleep patterns can directly alter disease risk.

Source: PLOS Medicine.