Do Older People Really Need Less Sleep?
— FACT OR FAKE?
By Sadho Ram — 19 Oct 2014, 06:12 PM — Updated about 10 years ago
It's a commonly-held belief that as we grow older, our sleep needs decreases. This is spurred by the observance that older people generally tend to sleep for a shorter duration of time.
Most of us have heard that we need less sleep as we age. So when older people spend hours awake in the middle of night or wake before the sun comes up, they tend to accept it as a normal part of ageing.
It's long been known that the older we get, the less we sleep. While there are many proposed reasons for why this happens, a new study offers, for the first time, a neurological reason for the phenomenon
A specific cluster of neurons associated with regulating sleep patterns, called the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus, may slowly die off as you get older. "The more of these cells you lose from aging, the harder time you have sleeping," lead researcher Clifford Saper, M.D., Ph.D., chairman of neurology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told HuffPost.
Saper noted that by the time people are in their 70s, they’re generally sleeping an hour and a half less than they did when they were in their 20s. "They’re not feeling rested -- they're getting up because they can't sleep anymore, but they're still tired during the day," he said. "It’s sort of a chronic insomnia state."
FAKE: Older people may sleep less at night due, in part, to frequent night waking, but their need for sleep is no less than that of younger adults
The idea that people need less sleep as they get older is a myth, according to a study showing that age bears no relation to how much sleep is necessary to function properly the next day. What does change with age is the tendency to wake up in the middle of the night. But although disturbed sleep is more common as people age, it affects older people's brain functioning less than it does that of younger people, scientists found.
Maintaining the same amount of sleep you had when you were 35 could help ward off age related “cognitive decline” and improve general health, he said. Speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Prof Drummond, a psychologist at the University of California, said: “The ability to sleep goes down as you age but it is a myth that older people need less sleep.
telegraph.co.uk“Older adults benefit from getting as much sleep as they get when they were in their 30s. This varies from person to person but whatever you slept when you were 35 should be the same from 75. The problem is people find it harder to sleep as they get older and they think that that is a sign that they need less sleep but that is not the case."
telegraph.co.uk