WEB DESK, June 29(ABC): If you’re around the age of 40 and feel like you don’t get a lot of sleep, researchers have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is you’re right – you probably don’t.
The good news is it gets better from here.
A graph of how people in the United States sleep over their lifetime forms a U-shaped pattern across our lifetimes, with the age of 40 being the bottom, according to a new studyTrusted Source from researchers at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.
Dr. Xiaoling Wang, a genetic epidemiologist and co-author of the study, wrote how much sleep we get tends to decrease across our lifetime, although her team found sleep efficiency stabilized from age 30 to 60.
They confirmed children and adolescents sleep later, middle-aged people sleep less, and sleep time goes back up around age 60.
Researchers looked at data from 11,279 people 6 and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), which focuses on different populations or health topics. Data on these participants was collected from 2011-to 2014 and released in late 2020.
Participants wore accelerometers on their non-dominant wrist 24 hours a day for seven consecutive days. The device didn’t directly measure sleep time. However, researchers used movement as a measure, assuming the least amount meant the subject was sleeping.
