'Sleep age' can determine longterm health | 90 Seconds w/ Lisa Kim

Numbers tell a story. From your credit score to your age, metrics predict a variety of outcomes, whether it's your likelihood to get a loan or your risk for heart disease. Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have described another telling metric -- one that can predict mortality. It's called sleep age.

Sleep age is a projected age that correlates to one's health based on their quality of sleep. So for instance, if you analyze the sleep characteristics of dozens of 55-year-olds and average them out, you'll have an idea of what sleep looks like at that age. For instance, someone who's 55 and sleeps soundly through the night with good quality REM cycles could, theoretically, might have a sleep age of 45.

Sleep expert Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, and his colleagues analyzed some 12,000 studies, each of which focused on an individual, that reported characteristics of their sleep -- such as chin and leg movement, breathing and heartbeat. Their goal was to develop a system that assigns one's sleep age and, using machine learning, identifies the variations in sleep most closely linked to mortality.

Read the full story: stan.md/3ALqD2W

Emmanuel Mignot, MD, PhD, is a Professor of Sleep Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, as well as the Director of the Stanford Center for Narcolepsy. He has received numerous awards for his work, including a 2023 Breakthrough prize in Life Sciences, and is a member of both the National Academies of Sciences and Medicine.

Lisa Kim is Senior Manager of Media Relations for Stanford Medicine and Stanford Health Care. Lisa has a deep background in journalism, as she is an Emmy Award-winning journalist who has covered stories on both the national and local levels.

#Sleep #Health #Brain

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