Regular sleep may be important than how long you sleep.
This is the harvest of a comprehensive new study that connects six different sleep characteristics, including bedtime consistency and circadian stability, to 172 diseases in almost every major body system. Using purpose data from British adults over 6.8 years of age, the researchers found that nearly half of the study conditions accounted for more than 20% of the risk. This work is published in Health Data Scienceproviding the most comprehensive look to date to achieve how objective sleep patterns shape long-term health.
Sleep characteristics affect the risk of disease throughout the body
The study used a wrist accelerometer to track six different sleep characteristics:
- Duration of night sleep
- Sleep start time
- Relative amplitude (day and night activity rhythm)
- Daily stability (sleep regularity)
- Sleep efficiency
- Frequency of wake up at night
These characteristics are associated with 172 diseases in 13 physiological systems, including the circulatory system, metabolism, respiratory, digestive system, and nervous system.
“Our findings emphasize the importance of sleep routines,” said Professor Shengfeng Wang, senior author of the Peking University study. “It’s time to expand the definition of good sleep beyond duration.”
The biggest risk associated with sleep rhythm, not duration
One of the most striking findings is that poor sleep rhythms are often more likely to predict disease than sleep duration. Patients with the lowest relative amplitude (measured of circadian rhythm intensity) had a 3.36-fold higher physically related risk. Similarly, those with the most irregular sleep schedule have a 2.61-fold higher risk of gangrene and a 2.57-fold higher risk of cirrhosis if they often go to bed after 12:30 a.m.
Some common diseases attributed to most of the burden of sleep characteristics include:
- Parkinson’s disease: 37.05%
- Type 2 Diabetes: 36.12%
- Acute renal failure: 21.85%
- Obesity: 31.63%
- Thyroid toxicity: 30.45%
Challenging assumptions about “long sleep”
This study also expressed doubts about the previous link between prolonged sleep duration (≥9 hours) and cardiovascular disease. When objective sleep tracking is used, only one disease shows an increased risk of long sleepers. One possible explanation: Nearly 22% of self-reported long sleepers are actually less than 6 hours of real sleep, suggesting they are confused with actual sleep in bed.
This misclassification tends toward early research and may explain the wrong association between long sleep and conditions such as stroke and heart disease. When objectively short-term sleeper categories are excluded from the long-term sleeper category, the risk of disease disappears.
Newly found sleep links copied in U.S. data
The team confirmed four previously unknown associations in the American Independent Dataset (NHANES), including links between breaks in sleep rhythms and:
- Acute renal failure
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
- Type 2 diabetes
- Depressed
Inflammatory markers such as C-reactive protein and leukocyte count appear to mediate these associations, suggesting the biological rationality of sleep-disease linkages.
Sleep behavior is a modifiable risk factor
One of the most promising implications of the study is that many of these dangerous sleep characteristics can be altered. Four of the six tracking features are behavior-based. By simply increasing consistency in bedtime or reducing the use of nighttime phone calls, individuals may reduce the long-term risk of their major illness.
“These results provide a strong reason for incorporating objective sleep tracking into population health research,” the authors wrote. “They stress the importance of how sleep we sleep.”
Since nearly 350 traits were found – the association of diseases, and some risks were comparable to those of obesity or smoking, this study repositioned as a core pillar of health prevention that we often could control.
Diary and doi
Magazine: Health Data Science
doi: 10.34133/hds.0161
Article title: A comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of diseases related to objectively measured sleep characteristics and compared with subjective sleep characteristics in 88,461 adults
Publication date: June 3, 2025
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