Key points from article :
Increased sleep fragmentation is the “strongest predictor of mortality,” according to a new review of studies.
They assessed 12,000 studies investigating characteristics of individuals during their sleep, including chin and leg movement, breathing, and heartbeat.
They developed a system to predict a person’s “sleep age” and identify variations in sleep linked to mortality.
Sleep age, they say, is an estimated age of a person based on the characteristics of sleep that are linked to their health.
Sleep fragmentation is when people briefly wake up several times at night without remembering it.
“Determining why sleep fragmentation is so detrimental to health is something we plan to study in the future,” Emmanuel Mignot, lead researcher said.
Older sleep age is an indicator of a health problem.
The study was carried out at Stanford University and published in Digital Medicine.
