New Delhi: Good sleep may help mitigate the adverse effects of type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke on the brain, researchers have found.
People with cardiometabolic disorders who sleep well have better cognitive function and a greater brain volume, compared to those having the same conditions but sleep poorly, according to the study by a team including researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet.
Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke — collectively referred to as cardiometabolic diseases — are linked to an increased risk of cognitive decline and dementia. The researchers investigated whether healthy sleep can mitigate these associations.
“Cardiometabolic diseases are very common in older adults, and they are among the most well-established risk factors for declining cognitive and brain health,” Abigail Dove, a researcher in the department of neurobiology, care sciences and society at Karolinska Institutet, said.
“Our findings suggest that healthy sleep may help offset some of the adverse consequences of cardiometabolic disease for the brain. This is meaningful because for most people, improving sleep is an accessible and achievable goal,” Dove said.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, is based on data from more than 4,00,000 middle-aged and older people in the UK Biobank, of whom just over 54,000 had at least one cardiometabolic disease.
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of the brain were also available for nearly 35,000 of the study participants.
Sleep was assessed based on five self-reported factors: sleep duration, circadian rhythm, insomnia, snoring and daytime sleepiness.
The researchers found that people with cardiometabolic disease who slept well performed slightly better on tests of general cognition, problem-solving ability and processing speed than those with the same conditions who slept poorly.
They also had significantly larger total brain volume, as well as greater volumes of grey and white matter. The link between sleep and brain structure was more pronounced in people with type 2 diabetes, heart disease or stroke than in those without these conditions.
“Healthy sleep may attenuate the associations of CMDs (cardiometabolic disorders) with poorer cognitive performance and markers of brain atrophy. The findings highlight sleep as a modifiable factor that may support cognitive and brain health in individuals with CMDs,” according to the study.
