Large study shows benefits of deep sleep
PLOS
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Sleep quantity and quality is a priority of China’s National
Health Commission and a focus in China more broadly. The most recent 2026 China
Sleep Health White Paper finds that while the average surveyed Chinese person
sleeps 6.97 hours per night, 23 percent sleep less than 6 hours per night. The
same report notes that only 26 percent of respondents reported a consistent
sleep schedule, and that disturbances to sleep have increased over time.
Understanding how sleep patterns are linked to disease risk is therefore of
great relevance to Chinese citizens.
There remains limited understanding of how sleep stages and
other real-world sleep patterns relate to health outcomes. In part, that is
because self-reported sleep measures often show poor correlation with objective
assessments, making it difficult to capture real-world sleep patterns.
In the new study, researchers analyzed data from 95,559 UK
Biobank participants who wore wrist accelerometers for seven consecutive days
and nights. The researchers used a deep-learning algorithm to calculate sleep
stages (REM, deep, and light sleep), total sleep duration, wakefulness after
sleep onset, and night-to-night sleep irregularity. Participants were followed
for a median of 8.9 years, and health records were available to test for
associations with more than 1,000 disease outcomes.
Greater REM sleep (per interquartile range, 47.6 minutes) was associated with a lower risk of 83 diseases, including heart failure (hazard ratio 0.74), dementia (hazard ratio 0.54), and Parkinson’s disease (hazard ratio 0.20), while greater deep sleep was linked to lower risk of 7 conditions, including type 2 diabetes and major depressive disorder. Greater sleep irregularity and wakefulness after sleep onset were each linked to higher risk of several conditions, including anxiety and substance use disorders.
Total sleep duration showed a non-linear relationship with disease risk for
many conditions, with the lowest risk concentrated in a 6-to-8-hour window;
people sleeping less than 5 hours faced the most elevated clinical
vulnerability, with an increased risk of 37 conditions. However, as an
observational study, this research cannot establish that sleep patterns
directly cause disease risk.
“The findings provide additional evidence supporting the
role of a 6-8 hours’ sleep duration as a health safeguard for middle-aged and
older adults, likely attributable to more favorable distributions of sleep
stages,” the authors say. “Maintaining a sleep duration of 6-8 hours can
effectively reduce the risk of multiple diseases, providing new insights for
health promotion and preventive practice.”
The authors add, “Phenome-wide association analysis
identified 156 significant associations between sleep patterns and incident
diseases after Bonferroni correction.”
“Sleep duration exhibited significant non-linear
associations with 86 disease phenotypes, with the minimum-risk duration for the
majority of these conditions (69 phenotypes) precisely concentrated within a
6-8 hour window.”
This work was supported by the National Science Fund for
Distinguished Young Scholars (82025031 to RC), the Key Program of the National
Natural Science Foundation of China (82230109 to RC), the Beijing Outstanding
Young Scientist Program (JWZQ20240101024 to RC), and the Young Beijing Scholars
Project, the Chinese Institutes for Medical Research, Beijing (CX23YZ01 to RC).
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision
to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Journal Reference:
- Jingsong
Luo, Ruiyi Liu, Jie Yin, Wangnan Cao, Shengzhi Sun, Rui Chen. Accelerometer-derived
real-world sleep stages and risk of incident diseases: A UK Biobank cohort
study and phenome-wide association analysis. PLOS Medicine,
2026; 23 (9): e1005213 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1005213