Depression affects many aspects of life, and for some people it may mean that they sleep longer or different hours than they would normally. “We have known for some time that there is a relationship between sleep timing and mood, but a question we often hear from clinicians is: How much earlier do we need to shift people to see a benefit?” says senior author Celine Vetter, assistant professor of integrative physiology at Colorado University Boulder, in a press release.
A previous study from Vetter and collaborators found that in a four-year study of 32,000 nurses that “early risers” were 27 percent less likely to develop depression symptoms. But how would shifting a sleep schedule potentially affect people? That’s what this new study focuses on.
The study followed 840,000 people and collected data on their chronotype, meaning what hours of the day they were predisposed to prefer, based on genetic information. One “clock gene” is thought to account for 12 to 42 percent of our sleep timing.
The team focused on the sleep midpoint, calculated as halfway between bedtime and wake time. “We found that even one-hour earlier sleep timing is associated with significantly lower risk of depression,” says Vetter in the press release. So if someone who normally goes to bed at midnight instead goes to bed at 11 PM and sleeps for the same duration, they could cut their risk by 23 percent, according to the study. The effect could be nearly twice that if shifted by two hours.
Read more at The Hill.
{Matzav.com}
