The study, involving 730,187 participants spread across 63 countries, explored how sleep patterns change across the lifespan and how they differ between countries.
Study participants were playing the Sea Hero Quest mobile game, a citizen science venture designed for neuroscience research, created by Deutsche Telekom in partnership with Alzheimer’s Research UK, UCL, UEA and game developers Glitchers Is.
The game was designed to aid Alzheimer’s research by highlighting differences in spatial navigation abilities More than four million people have played Sea Hero Quest, contributing to the many studies throughout the project.
In addition to completing tasks that test navigation ability, anyone playing the game is asked to provide demographic characteristics as well as answers to other questions that may be useful for neuroscience research, such as sleep patterns. on the pattern.
The researchers found that in the study sample, people slept an average of 7.01 hours per night, while women slept an average of 7.5 minutes longer than men. They found that the youngest participants in the sample (minimum age 19) slept the most, and that sleep duration declined in people’s 20s and early 30s, remaining stable until their early 50s and then increased from
The pattern for declining sleep plateaus, including the newly identified critical time points of age 33 and rising again at 53, was similar for men and women, and for all countries and education levels.
All in the Timing: Sleep Changes With Age
Previous studies have found associations between age and sleep duration, but this is the first large study to identify these three distinct stages during life.
They found that people worldwide sleep less during middle-adulthood, but average sleep duration varies between regions and countries.
Those who report sleeping the most are in Eastern European countries such as Albania, Slovakia, Romania, and the Czech Republic, who report an extra 20–40 minutes of sleep per night, and Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. lowest in .
People in the United Kingdom reported sleeping slightly less than average. People in countries closer to the equator sleep a little less.
The researchers found that navigational ability was unaffected by sleep duration for most of the sample, except for older adults (ages 54-70), whose optimal sleep duration was seven hours, although they caution that the findings among older adults may be inconsistent. Can be affected by built-in. Health Conditions.
Source: Eurekalert
