Elderly Sleep Habits Start Young, Study Says

PITTSBURGH —  Waking up early may say less about your enthusiasm for work or the need to change the baby than it does about your age.

As the years go by, the average person gradually becomes a morning person--a lark as opposed to a night owl--and the change starts by age 30, according to a University of Pittsburgh study on sleep among middle-age people.

Sleep experts already knew that the elderly suffer from deteriorated sleep quality but did not realize how early the decline begins.

“The sleep community almost always has compared young to old. The how and when of how sleep deteriorates has received almost no attention,” said Julie Carrier, 30, the study leader, who presented her findings June 23 in New Orleans to the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

Suzanne Woodward, director of clinical sleep research for Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit, said Carrier’s findings were significant.

“As a preliminary study, it’s very interesting,” Woodward said.

Carrier’s team analyzed 100 healthy adults aged 20 to 59. The subjects kept diaries for 14 nights, and researchers assessed their sleep habits in a laboratory on three nights.

The study concluded that people in middle age tend to go to sleep earlier, wake more often, get up earlier and feel more alert when they wake up than people in their 20s.

They also spend less time in deep sleep and the rapid-eye-movement stage of sleep--a stage at which researchers believe people dream and consolidate memory.

Even by age 40, many people are deep-sleeping as little as people over 70, Carrier said. “It’s almost disappeared. At 40 years old, you have very low levels.”

Most of the changes are probably tied to the internal “clock” that regulates the body’s cycle of sleep and wakefulness, she said. Other causes are possible, however, including the worries about children and jobs that are common to middle age.

“They have a different life than 25-year-old people. That’s why we want to go and evaluate the psychological to see how we can explain this deterioration,” Carrier said.

What difference the changes make isn’t clear, she said. Unlike seniors, middle-age people tend not to complain about trouble sleeping. Further study could reveal whether jet lag and shift work affect middle-aged people more than young people.

The study, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, also determined that “larks” of all ages get less sack time and REM time than “night owls” and wake up faster.