Older people may need less sleep, study finds

When asked to stay in bed for 16 hours in the dark each day for several days, younger people get an average of 9 hours of shuteye compared to 7.5 for older people, the researchers report.

“The most parsimonious explanation for our results is that older people need less sleep,” said Elizabeth Klerman of Brigham and Women’s Hospital & Harvard Medical School, who conducted the study with Professor Derk-Jan Dijk of the University of Surrey. “It’s also possible that they sleep less even when given the opportunity for more sleep because of age-related changes in the ability to fall asleep and remain asleep,” she added, noting that the new results apply only to healthy individuals taking no medication and having no medical conditions or sleep disorders.

The study also found that most healthy people, and young people in particular, don’t get as much sleep as they need.

The idea that sleep changes markedly across the life span isn’t new. In fact, insomnia is a common complaint amongst older people. But whether age-related changes in sleep are due to changes in social factors, circadian rhythms, or shifts in the an internal “set point” for sleep need or the ability to sleep had remained unresolved.

In the new study, Klerman and Dijk set out to compare the capacity for sleep in young people (between the ages of 18 and 32) compared to older people (age 60 to 72) under conditions that controlled for circadian rhythms by allowing the chance to sleep both during the night and day and by controlling individual choices in sleep opportunities.

“While humans can sometimes override the homeostatic set point and not sleep when tired, there is no evidence that they can sleep when they are not tired,” Klerman explained.

Given the same amount of time in bed, older people take longer to fall asleep and sleep for less time than younger people do, they found. When required to remain in bed for 16 hours a day, older people slept 1.5 hours less on average than younger people, they showed. That age-related decline in sleep included an even split between rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which is associated with dreaming, and non-REM sleep, they found.

The findings may influence treatment for insomnia in older people, Klerman said.
“If older people believe that they need more sleep than they can achieve even when they spend extra time in bed, then they may complain of insomnia: being awake when wanting to be asleep. They may start using medications needlessly. If they are tired during the day, they should consider evaluation for a sleep disorder that may be interfering with their ability to obtain good sleep at night”