{"id":6141,"date":"2025-10-07T14:54:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T14:54:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/?p=6141"},"modified":"2025-10-08T21:33:43","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T21:33:43","slug":"common-habit-is-literally-rotting-your-brain-heres-what-you-can-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/07\/common-habit-is-literally-rotting-your-brain-heres-what-you-can-do\/","title":{"rendered":"Common habit is literally rotting your brain \u2014 here\u2019s what you can do"},"content":{"rendered":"
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We all know that sleep is good for you. It\u2019s recommended that we get around 7-9 hours a night, but this does differ from person to person. However, it turns out bad sleep does not just leave you feeling groggy but it could also be causing you to rapidly age. A new study from the Karolinska Institutet<\/a> revealed that people with poor sleep also appeared \u2018significantly older\u2019. So, why does this happen? (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The researchers examined sleep behaviour and detailed brain MRI scan data in more than 27,000 UK adults between the ages of 40 and 70. They found that people who had poor sleep had brains that appeared significantly older than expected based on their actual age. They found that through advances in brain imaging and artificial intelligence, they could estimate a person\u2019s brain age based on patterns in brain MRI scans. This includes a loss of brain tissue, thinning of the cortex and damage to blood vessels (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The researchers estimated brain age using over 1,000 different imaging markers from MRI scans through training a machine learning model on the scans of the healthiest participants \u2013 people with no major diseases and whose brains should closely match their chronological age. This is important to know as having a brain age which is higher than your actual age means that you\u2019re aging rapidly, which could lead to faster cognitive decline, greater dementia risk and even higher risk of early death (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So what did they find?<\/h2>\n
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The researchers found that for every one-point drop in sleep quality, brain age advanced by about six months, and that the worst sleepers in the study had brains that looked nearly a year older than their actual age. The researchers broke down sleep qualities into five factors: how much you sleep, whether you snore, whether you suffer from insomnia, your daytime sleepiness, and whether you\u2019re a night owl (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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They found that being a night owl and getting too little or too much sleep were the biggest issues for brain ageing. It also seems that bad sleep spikes inflammatory markers in the body, which can affect your whole body by wreaking havoc on your brain\u2019s blood vessels and cleanup systems. The researchers say: \u2018We were able to investigate the role of inflammation thanks to blood samples collected from participants at the beginning of the study’ (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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‘These samples contain a wealth of information about different inflammatory biomarkers circulating in the body. When we factored this into our analysis, we found that inflammation levels accounted for about 10% of the connection between sleep and brain ageing\u2019 (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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The researchers explain that poor sleep could also harm the glymphatic system, which is the brain\u2019s built-in waste clearance network and is mainly active during sleep. When sleep is interrupted, this system may not function properly, allowing harmful substances to build up in the brain. Brain ageing cannot be avoided, but how we live our life can help shape how it unfolds\u00a0(Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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But the good news is that sleep habits are modifiable. The researchers suggest that there are a few simple strategies, including keeping a regular sleep schedule, limiting caffeine, alcohol and screen use before bedtime, as well as creating a dark and quiet sleep environment (Picture: Getty)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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We all know that sleep is good for you. It\u2019s recommended that we get around 7-9 hours a night, but this does differ from person to person. However, it turns out bad sleep does not just leave you feeling groggy but it could also be causing you to rapidly age. A new study from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6143,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6141"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6141"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6141\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6152,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6141\/revisions\/6152"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/curiousdrive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}