TORONTO (Dispatches) --
According to a recent research older people with insomnia are at greater risk of developing memory decline and long-term cognitive impairment such as dementia.
Canadian researchers at Université de Montréal conducted a study based on data from more than 26,000 participants of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, all aged between 45 and 85.
They compared completed self-reported evaluations of sleep and memory and neuropsychological testing in several cognitive domains from 2019 and a follow-up in 2022. Participants who reported worsening sleep quality in that three-year interval also had greater odds of reporting subjective memory decline.
The study’s co-lead author Nathan Cross reports that they discovered that insomnia specifically was related to worse memory performance compared to those who have some insomnia symptoms alone or no sleep problems at all. He says the deficit in memory was specific, as they also looked at other cognitive function domains such as attention span multi-tasking. They only found differences in memory.