More REM Sleep Linked to Lower Risk of 83 Diseases — SkimNews
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- Shengzhi Sun and colleagues at Capital Medical University analyzed wrist accelerometer data from 95,559 UK Biobank participants over seven days, tracking them for a median of 8.9 years against more than 1,000 disease outcomes.
- Greater REM sleep (per 47.6-minute interquartile increase) was associated with lower risk of 83 diseases, including heart failure (HR 0.74), dementia (HR 0.54), and Parkinson's disease (HR 0.20).
- Greater deep sleep was linked to lower risk of 7 conditions, including type 2 diabetes and major depressive disorder, according to the study published in PLOS Medicine.
- Total sleep duration showed a non-linear relationship with disease risk across 86 phenotypes, with the lowest risk concentrated in a 6-to-8-hour window.
- Sleeping less than 5 hours was tied to elevated risk across 37 conditions, while greater sleep irregularity and wakefulness after sleep onset were linked to higher anxiety and substance use disorder risk.
- The authors cautioned that as an observational study, the findings cannot establish that sleep patterns directly cause disease risk.
Why it matters: For the 95,559 middle-aged and older adults tracked over a median of 8.9 years, the data reframes sleep as a multi-disease safeguard: maintaining 6-8 hours with adequate REM and deep stages maps to measurably lower risk across 83 conditions, though the observational design limits the causal weight doctors can assign.
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