Poorer sleep impairs brain health at midlife

Participants

The UK Biobank study is a large population-based cohort study, which consists of 502,536 participants aged 37–73 years who were identified and invited through the National Health Service central registries. The methodology used has been extensively described elsewhere⁵³. Briefly, those who accepted the invitation to participate undertook first assessment between 2006 and 2010 and were invited for first follow-up assessment between 2012 and 2014 and for imaging assessment in 2014 onwards. A large number of measures were collected at each assessment visit including demographic, dietary, health questionnaires, physical measures, blood samples and biomarkers and sub-sample of participants were also invited to undertake brain scans, cardiac scans and other imaging measures.

Participants who had complete data for sleep measures at both the baseline and the imaging visit and…