Consistent lack of sleep is related to future depressive symptoms

Consistently sleeping less than five hours a night might raise the risk of developing depressive symptoms, according to a new genetic study led by UCL researchers

2023-10-20

(Press-News.org) Consistently sleeping less than five hours a night might raise the risk of developing depressive symptoms, according to a new genetic study led by UCL (University College London) researchers.

Historically, poor sleep has been seen as a side effect of mental ill health, but this study found that the link between sleep and mental illness is more complex.

The study, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, analysed data from people with an average age of 65 and found short sleep was associated with the onset of depressive symptoms.

Lead author Odessa S. Hamilton (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care) said: “We have this chicken or egg scenario between suboptimal sleep duration and depression, they frequently cooccur, but which comes first is largely unresolved. Using genetic susceptibility to disease we determined that sleep likely precedes depressive symptoms, rather than the inverse.”

For the study, the researchers used genetic and health data from 7,146 people recruited by the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), a nationally representative population study in England.

They found that people with a stronger genetic predisposition to short sleep (less than five hours in a given night) were more likely to develop depressive symptoms over 4-12 years, but that people with a greater genetic predisposition to depression did not have an increased likelihood of short sleep.

Senior author Dr Olesya Ajnakina (UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London) said: “Short and long sleep durations, along with depression, are major contributors to public health burden that are highly heritable. Polygenic scores, indices of an individual’s genetic propensity for a trait, are thought to be key in beginning to understand the nature of sleep duration and depressive symptoms.”

The researchers assessed the strength of genetic predisposition among the ELSA participants using findings from previous genome-wide association studies that have identified thousands of genetic variants linked to a higher likelihood of developing depression and short or long sleep.

As part of a number of separate analyses to investigate the robustness of their results, the research team also looked at non-genetic associations between depressive symptoms and sleep duration.

They found that people sleeping five hours or less were 2.5 times more likely to develop depressive symptoms, while people with depressive symptoms were a third more likely to suffer from short sleep. They adjusted for a rich selection of factors that could affect the results such as education, wealth, smoking status, physical activity and limiting longstanding illness.

The researchers also found a link between sleeping long and developing depressive symptoms, with participants sleeping longer than nine hours being 1.5 times more likely to develop depressive symptoms than those who sleep an average of seven hours. However, depressive symptoms were not associated with sleeping longer four to 12 years later, which corresponded to the genetic findings.

Professor Andrew Steptoe (Head of Behavioural Science and Health, UCL Institute of Epidemiology & Health Care) said: “Suboptimal sleep and depression increase with age, and with the worldwide phenomenon of population ageing there is a growing need to better understand the mechanism connecting depression and a lack of sleep. This study lays important groundwork for future investigations on the intersection of genetics, sleep, and depressive symptoms.”

Overall, the participants in the study had an average of seven hours’ sleep a night. More than 10% slept for less than five hours a night at the start of the study period, rising to over 15% at the end of the study period, and the proportion of participants classed as having depressive symptoms increased by ~3 percentage points, from 8.75-11.47%.

Both sleep duration and depression are partly inherited from one generation to the next. Earlier twin studies have suggested depression is about 35% heritable, and that genetic differences account for 40% of the variance in sleep duration.

In the study, data on sleep and depressive symptoms were combined from two ELSA surveys conducted two years apart, as sleep duration and depression are known to fluctuate over time.

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Identifying the maker of an artwork by fingerprint examination

2023-10-20

Dzemila Sero, now Migelien Gerritzen Fellow at the Rijksmuseum and former postdoc at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, together with a team of researchers from the Rijksmuseum, Leiden and Cambridge University, examined the terracotta sculpture Study for a Hovering Putto attributed to Laurent Delvaux (1696 - 1778) and housed in the Rijksmuseum permanent collection. The methodology and findings were published open access in Science Advances in a paper with title "Artist profiling using micro-CT scanning of a Rijksmuseum terracotta sculpture". To acquire preserved impressions on the sculpture, researchers ...

Dietary supplement modifies gut microbiome – potential implications for bone marrow transplant patients

2023-10-20

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Michigan conducted a phase I pilot study to assess the feasibility of using potato starch as a dietary intervention to modify the gut microbiome in bone marrow transplant patients. The study, which appears in the journal Nature Medicine, is the first part of a two-phase ongoing clinical trial evaluating the effect of modifying the microbiome on the incidence of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), a major complication that develops in up to half ...

Keeping a human in the loop: Managing the ethics of AI in medicine

2023-10-20

Artificial intelligence (AI)—of ChatGPT fame—is increasingly used in medicine to improve diagnosis and treatment of diseases, and to avoid unnecessary screening for patients. But AI medical devices could also harm patients and worsen health inequities if they are not designed, tested, and used with care, according to an international task force that included a University of Rochester Medical Center bioethicist. Jonathan Herington, PhD, was a member of the AI Task Force of the Society for Nuclear Medicine and Medical Imaging, which laid out recommendations on how to ethically develop and use AI medical devices in two papers published ...

High pregnancy weight gain tied to higher risk of death in the following decades

2023-10-20

Pregnant people who gained more than the now-recommended amount of weight had a higher risk of death from heart disease or diabetes in the decades that followed, according to new analysis of 50 years of data published in The Lancet and led by researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The group studied a large national data set that stretched from when a person gave birth through the next five decades, assessing mortality rates to show the potential long-term effects of weight gain in pregnancy. Higher risk of death was found for all weight groups studied — including those defined ...

First-of-its kind hormone replacement treatment shows promise in patient trials

2023-10-20

A first-of-its kind hormone replacement therapy that more closely replicates the natural circadian and ultradian rhythms of our hormones has shown to improve symptoms in patients with adrenal conditions. Results from the University of Bristol-led clinical trial are published today [20 October] in the Journal of Internal Medicine. Low levels of a key hormone called ‘cortisol’ is typically a result of conditions such as Addison's and Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia. The hormone regulates a range of vital processes, ...

For relationship maintenance, accurate perception of partner’s behavior is key

2023-10-19

URBANA, Ill. – Married couples and long-term romantic partners typically engage in a variety of behaviors that sustain and nourish the relationship. These actions promote higher levels of commitment, which benefits couples’ physical and psychological health. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at how such relationship maintenance behaviors interact with satisfaction and commitment. “Relationship maintenance is a well-established measure of couple behavior. In our study, we measured it with five main categories, ...

NASA's Webb discovers new feature in Jupiter’s atmosphere

2023-10-19

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has discovered a new, never-before-seen feature in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The high-speed jet stream, which spans more than 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) wide, sits over Jupiter’s equator above the main cloud decks. The discovery of this jet is giving insights into how the layers of Jupiter’s famously turbulent atmosphere interact with each other, and how Webb is uniquely capable of tracking those features. “This is something that totally surprised us,” said Ricardo Hueso of the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, lead author on the paper ...

MD Anderson research highlights: ESMO 2023 special edition

2023-10-19

ABSTRACTS: LBA71, 1088MO, 95MO, LBA48, 1082O, 1085O, LBA34, 243MO MADRID ― The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Research Highlights provides a glimpse into recent basic, translational and clinical cancer research from MD Anderson experts. This special edition features upcoming oral presentations by MD Anderson researchers at the 2023 European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress focused on clinical advances across a variety of cancer types. Highlights include a combination strategy for EGFR-mutant metastatic lung cancer, updated results for a Phase ...

To excel at engineering design, generative AI must learn to innovate, study finds

2023-10-19

ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before. But as MIT engineers say in a new study, similarity isn’t enough if you want to truly innovate in engineering tasks. “Deep generative models (DGMs) are ...

Startup workers flee for bigger, more established companies during pandemic

2023-10-19

October 19, 2023 Startup workers flee for bigger, more established companies during pandemic Findings reveal vulnerability of early-stage firms in downturns Toronto - The world may have felt like it had stopped in the pandemic’s first weeks. But a “flight to safety” was underway at a popular digital job platform catering to the startup sector. Digging into the data for nearly 180,000 users from AngelList Talent (now called Wellfound), the biggest online recruitment platform for private and entrepreneurial companies, researchers have found that U.S. job hunters turned away from smaller, early-stage companies in favour of positions at bigger, more established firms. Just ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

CMD-OPT model enables the discovery of a potent and selective RIPK2 inhibitor as preclinical candidate for the treatment of acute liver injury

Melatonin receptor 1a alleviates sleep fragmentation-aggravated testicular injury in T2DM by suppression of TAB1/TAK1 complex through FGFR1

Single-cell RNA sequencing reveals Shen-Bai-Jie-Du decoction retards colorectal tumorigenesis by regulating the TMEM131–TNF signaling pathway-mediated differentiation of immunosuppressive dendritic ce