Regular daytime naps ‘slow down brain shrinkage by seven years’
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By Joe Pinkstone
Napping during the day may slow down brain shrinkage and cancel out up to seven years of ageing, a study suggests.
The data is the first to suggest that taking a 30-minute siesta in the middle of the day could have a causal impact on brain health and function.
Information gathered from almost 400,000 people in Britain aged between 40 and 69 show that those with a genetic disposition for napping had a larger total brain volume.
Brain volume, the size of the organ, is linked to good cognitive health and a lower risk of dementia.
Various past studies have shown that there is a link between napping and better brain performance and appearance, but there has been little in the way of evidence to suggest that sleeping during the day is what is boosting performance.
But the UCL scientists behind the new research have now found “a modest causal association between habitual daytime napping and larger total brain volume”.
People who are genetically hard-wired to nap during the day were found to have a larger brain, equivalent to staving off between 2.6 and 6.5 years of ageing.
‘Reducing stigma of a siesta’
Almost 100 snippets of DNA were involved in the research, which scientists have previously found to be more common in people who regularly nap.
MRI scans revealed they, on average, had a brain that was 15.8 cubic centimetres bigger than those who did not nap.
There was no link between napping and the size of the hippocampus – the region of the brain linked to memory and learning.
“This is the first study to attempt to untangle the causal relationship between habitual daytime napping and cognitive and structural brain outcomes,” Valentina Paz, the study lead author and PhD candidate, said.
“Our study points to a causal link between habitual napping and larger total brain volume.”
Dr Garfield added: “I hope studies such as this one showing the health benefits of short naps can help to reduce any stigma that still exists around daytime napping.”
In their paper, published in the journal Sleep Health, the team add that the link between napping and brain volume might also mean napping “provides some protection against neurodegeneration through compensating for poor sleep”.
Prof Tara Spires-Jones, president of the British Neuroscience Association, group leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute and deputy director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, said the link in the new paper was “small but significant”.
She added that the paper did have some methodological limitations but it was still interesting. “It adds to the data indicating that sleep is important for brain health,” she said.
