Studies confirm the importance of a good night’s rest
Katie Peek
Illustration by James Steinberg
This series was created for Google, the Buck Institute, Optispan and Phenome Health by Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
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High-quality sleep is ubiquitous on lists of healthy habits, but just how big an effect does it actually have? In 2021, a team of researchers published the results of a study investigating that question. Using data from the U.K. Biobank, they categorized 328,850 participants according to how well they slept. (The five indicators of poor sleep they used are paraphrased below.) The researchers then tracked participants for about seven years, noting the occurrence of cancer, stroke, dementia and other diseases and conditions. The best sleepers were 15 percent less likely than poor sleepers to experience a healthspan-terminating event.
Graphic by Katie Peek; Illustration by James Steinberg; Source: Sambou et al., “Associations Between Sleep Quality and Health Span: A Prospective Cohort Study Based on 328,850 UK Biobank Participants,” in Frontiers in Genetics; June 15, 2021.
Explore the emerging science of healthspan in other stories in this special report.
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