Can sleep deprivation age your brain? According to a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, lack of sleep can age the structures of the brain overnight. Let’s take a look at the details together.
It turns out that sleep deprivation also ages your brain
Lack of sleep, even for a single night, can cause your brain to age, according to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience. When the brain ages, cognitive functions decline and chemical changes occur.
Sleep is an important time for our bodies to recover and recover from the day. Our brain does the same as our body during this process. Memory consolidation, clearing toxins and creating new neural pathways only happen while we sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, your brain doesn’t have enough time to perform important functions and its cognitive functions are affected.
This study uses MRI scans to investigate how sleep affects the age of brain structures. The participants included 134 healthy volunteers aged 19 to 39, with an average age of 25.3 years.
Four sleep conditions were measured during the study: Total sleep deprivation (no sleep), partial sleep deprivation (sleeping three hours) and chronic deprivation (sleeping five hours for five days), and a control group (sleeping eight hours).
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Of the four groups, only the total sleep deprivation group was found to have a steady increase in brain age of one to two years after a single night of sleep deprivation. Brain age did not change significantly in the other groups. Furthermore, a full night’s sleep reversed the aging effects of the brain.
This study has some limitations related to the age of the participants and the duration of the study. Therefore, more research is needed to investigate the long-term effects of sleep deprivation in different age groups and sleep habits.
So if you feel that your brain is slowing down, what you should definitely do is sleep. If you are constantly sleep deprived, the effects of brain aging may be permanent. What do you think? Please don’t forget to share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
