Study: Extreme Sleep Speeds Aging in Most Organs

A new study has found that sleeping too little or too much accelerates biological aging across nearly every organ in the body, with the healthiest patterns linked to about seven hours of sleep per night.

Researchers led by Junhao Wen, an assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, analyzed self-reported sleep data from nearly 500,000 participants in the UK Biobank. Published on May 13 in the journal Nature, the work used machine learning to develop 23 biological aging clocks across 17 organ systems, including the brain, heart, lungs, liver and immune system. These clocks estimate how quickly tissues and organs age by analyzing proteins from blood tests, medical images and metabolic data.

The analysis revealed a U-shaped pattern: people sleeping fewer than six hours or more than eight hours nightly showed faster aging in most organs compared to their chronological age. The slowest biological aging occurred in those averaging 6.4 to 7.8 hours. "In the liver, for example, we have an aging clock built with protein data, an aging clock of metabolic data, and an aging clock of imaging data," Wen said. This multi-layered approach...