A new Canadian study has found that older people with insomnia are at greater risk of developing memory decline and long-term cognitive impairment such as dementia.
The study, published in the journal SLEEP, is based on data from more than 26,000 participants of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, all aged between 45 and 85. The researchers compared completed self-reported evaluations of sleep and memory and neuropsychological testing in several cognitive domains from 2019 and a follow-up in 2022. Participants who reported worsening sleep quality in that three-year interval also had greater odds of reporting subjective memory decline.
“We found that insomnia specifically was related to worse memory performance compared to those who have some insomnia symptoms alone or no sleep problems at all,” says the study’s co-lead author Nathan Cross, a postdoctoral fellow at the Sleep,…
