Poor Sleep May Impact Stress Response in Older Adults
The study included 45 women and 38 men with an average age of 61. Though all of the participants were in good health overall, about 27 percent were poor sleepers. Compared with good sleepers, those who slept poorly reported more depressive symptoms, more loneliness and more general stress. At the start of the study, levels of IL-6 didn't differ between poor sleepers and good sleepers. However, when put through a battery of verbal and memory tests intended to stress them out, poor sleepers' levels of IL-6 spiked higher than that of the good sleepers.
"Our study suggests that, for healthy people, it all comes down to sleep and what poor sleep may be doing to our physiological stress response, our fight-or-flight response," study author Kathi Heffner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at University of Rochester Medical Center in New York.
