chronotype tagged posts

The familiar labels “night owl” and “early bird,” long used in sleep research, don’t fully capture the diversity of human internal clocks, a new study has found. The McGill University-led study published in Nature Communications found the two sleep-wake patterns, called chronotypes, contain a total of five distinct biological subtypes, each associated with different patterns of behavior and health.

A chronotype is based on the parts of a 24-hour period when a person naturally feels most alert or ready to sleep. Previous research has linked late chronotypes to worse health outcomes, but results have often been inconsistent. The new findings help explain why, the authors said.

“Rather than asking whether night owls are more at risk, the better question may be...

People who sleep poorly are more likely than others to have brains that appear older than they actually are. This is according to a comprehensive brain imaging study from Karolinska Institutet, published in the journal eBioMedicine. The paper is titled “Poor sleep health is associated with older brain age: the role of systemic inflammation.”

Increased inflammation in the body may partly explain the association.

Poor sleep has been linked to dementia, but it is unclear whether unhealthy sleep habits contribute to the development of dementia or whether they are rather early symptoms of the disease.

In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the link between sleep characteristics and how old the brain appears in relat...