Key takeaways:

• Longer REM sleep was associated with a lower risk for 83 diseases, while more deep sleep was associated with a lower risk for seven diseases.
• Those with 6 to 8 hours of sleep had the greatest risk reductions.

The durations of total, deep, and rapid eye movement sleep were tied to risks for 156 diseases, according to a study published in PLoS Medicine.

Previous studies have established links between sleep and risks for mortality and morbidity, Jingsong Luo, PhD, a researcher at Peking University in China, and colleagues wrote, although “most have primarily focused on sleep duration as measured by self-reported questionnaires.”

“Moreover, there remains limited understanding of how other real-world sleep patterns, such as sleep stages and fragmentation, relate to health outcomes,” they wrote.

The researchers assessed how sleep metrics, including wake after sleep onset, sleep irregularity, rapid eye movement (REM), and deep, light, and total sleep, affected the risks for 1,049 health outcomes among a cohort of 95,559 participants aged 37 to 73 years from the UK Biobank who had worn wrist accelerometers.

The participants (mean age, 56.2 years; 43.7% men) were followed for 8.9 years and had a median total sleep duration of 392.4 minutes.

Read more:Sleep patterns may influence over 150 diseases

Source: Healio