In past decades, insufficient sleep has been associated with mental disease; however, this study has revealed a deeper connection between sleep and mental health issues. Short sleep or long sleep was linked to the start of depressive symptoms, according to a study that was published in the Journal of Translational Psychiatry, conducted by Odessa S. Hamilton, Andrew Steptoe & Olesya Ajnakina.
The study examined data from participants who were 65 years of age on average. 7,146 participants were enrolled in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a nationally representative population study conducted in England, to provide genetic and health data for the study.
About The Study:
The researchers used results from earlier genome-wide association studies, which have found thousands of genetic variations linked to a higher risk of developing depression and short or lengthy sleep, to assess the intensity of genetic susceptibility among ELSA individuals.
The research team also examined non-genetic relationships between depression symptoms and sleep duration as part of several independent studies to examine the robustness of their findings.
The participants’ typical weeknight sleep duration was inquired about in an open-ended query designed to measure the duration of their sleep. The self-reported experiences of depression were evaluated using the eight-item Centre for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D).
The study participants slept for an average of seven hours every night. Over 10% of participants slept for less than five hours per night at the beginning of the study period, and by the end, that number had climbed to over 15%. Additionally, the percentage of individuals who were classified as having depressive symptoms went up by around 3 percentage points, from 8.75 to 11.47%.
Both depression and sleep duration partially inherit from one generation to the next. Previous twin studies have shown that genetic factors account for approximately 40% of the variability in sleep duration, and around 35% of heritability is observed for sadness.
We merged data on depression and sleep from two ELSA surveys completed two years apart for the study, as depression and sleep length are known to be correlated.
