A large study published in Health Data Science showed that sleep problems affect the risk for a total of 172 diseases, including dementia, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and kidney failure. The study followed nearly 90,000 individuals for almost seven years via wearables and linked their sleep habits to disease data.
Key insights
- For 92 of these diseases, poor sleep patterns account for at least 20% of the risk.
- For 42 diseases (for example gangrene and liver diseases) the risk was twice as high among those with irregular sleep patterns.
- The study focuses not just on hours of sleep, but above all on sleep regularity (consistent timing and rhythm), which turned out to be critical.
The message?
Sleep duration isn’t the only thing that matters, sleep patterns and regularity are at least as important for preventing chronic diseases. Improved sleep regularity may be a simple but powerful way to reduce the risk of serious disease.
