If you do this at 50, you will kill your memory and accelerate brain aging.

You are about 40-50 years old. Now you may think not, but what you do at this age has a big impact on your mental health and your well-being. memory which will accompany you for the rest of your life. In particular, this is due to what you do at night, since you are not sleeping well right now, your brain is getting old when in the later stages of your life. This means you may increase your risk of developing dementia.

That’s how important it is “Good night” for brain aging and memory strengthening. This is stated in a new study published in Neurologymedical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. This suggests that middle-aged people with poor sleep quality show more signs of poor brain health in late middle age. This means there is a link between poor sleep quality and symptoms brain aging. But what is poor sleep, according to research? This is interesting because the study looks at I don’t sleep well difficulty falling or staying asleep.

“Previous research has linked sleep problems with declines in thinking and memory abilities later in life, which increases the risk of developing dementia,” said study author Dr Clémence Cavailles from the University of California, San Francisco, US.

Poor sleep adds 3 more years of age to your brain

What’s new about the study, he says, is that “it used brain scans to determine the age of the participants’ brains and suggests that poor sleep is associated with nearly three additional years of brain aging already in middle age.

The nearly 600 people who took part in this study were on average 40 years old. Five years later (when they were on average 45 years old) they filled out a questionnaire about how they slept at night. And when they had a brain scan, another 15 years had passed (on average they were 55 years old).

The test you need to take to find out how you sleep: good or bad

Researchers asked participants in a sleep and brain aging study the following questions:

• Do you usually have trouble falling asleep?
• Do you usually wake up several times a night?
• Do you usually wake up too early?
• How many hours do you sleep?

They also identified six characteristics of poor sleep for each participant: short sleep duration, poor sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep, early morning awakenings, and daytime sleepiness. To pass the test, you need to add up how many of these characteristics associated with the bad sleep you are imagining.

Study participants were divided into three groups. Participants in the low sleep group did not have more than one sign of poor sleep. In the middle group there were from two to three. There were more than three of them in the older group. At baseline, approximately 70% were in the low group, 22% in the medium group, and 8% in the high group.

The researchers then looked at the brain scans of the participants to see the level of brain shrinkage at that particular age. They then used machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence) to determine the age of each participant’s brain.

Finally, the researchers found that people in the middle group (two to three characteristics of poor sleep) had average brain age is 1.6 years older than those in the low group, while those in the high group had an average brain age that was 2.6 years older.

Of the sleep characteristics most closely associated with increasing brain age were poor sleep quality, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep and difficulty waking up. early in the morning. They were especially bad if people had these sleep characteristics consistently for five years.

“Our results highlight the importance of addressing sleep problems early in life to maintain brain health, including maintaining a consistent sleep schedule, exercise, avoiding caffeine and alcohol before bed, and using relaxation techniques,” said Dr. Christine Yaffe, study author at the University of California, San Francisco and a member of the American Academy of Neurology.

And he concludes: “Future research should focus on finding new ways to improve sleep quality and examining the long-term effects of sleep on brain health in young people.”