Archives of gerontology and geriatricsJun 19, 2024

How Genes and Sleep Quality Together Relate to Faster Biological Aging

Longevity & Aging Weekly Brief ↗PubMed ↗DOI ↗

Updated Mar 28, 2026

Abstract

Participants with high sleep quality experienced a 1.056 year reduction in biological age acceleration compared to those with low sleep quality.

Medium sleep quality is associated with a 0.727 year decrease in biological age acceleration compared to low sleep quality.
Individuals with medium and high genetic risk show increases of 0.833 and 1.543 years in biological age acceleration, respectively.
A significant interaction exists between genetic risk and sleep quality affecting biological age acceleration.
Those with low sleep quality and high genetic risk may experience a 2.747 year increase in biological age acceleration compared to those with high sleep quality and low genetic risk.
Better sleep quality could mitigate the effects of genetic predisposition on accelerated biological ageing.

Simplified

OBJECTIVE: Genetic risks can accelerate ageing, yet better quality sleep may slow down it. We thus examined the interaction and combined effects of genetic predisposition and sleep quality on the risk of accelerate aging.

METHODS: This study included 407,027 participants from the UK Biobank. Sleep index of each participant was retrieved from the following seven sleep behaviors: snoring, chronotype, daytime sleepiness, sleep duration, insomnia, nap and difficulties in getting up. The biological age (PhenoAge) were estimated by corresponding algorithms based on clinical traits, and their residual discrepancies with chronological age were defined as the age accelerations (PhenoAgeaccel). We explored the interaction and combined effects of genetic risk and sleep quality on accelerated ageing by constructing a linear model.

RESULTS: Compared with participants in low sleep quality group, those in medium and high sleep quality group decreased 0.727 (95%CI, 0.653 to 0.801) and 1.056 (95%CI, 0.982 to 1.130) years of PhenoAgeaccel, respectively. Compared with participants in low genetic risk group, those in medium and high genetic risk group increased 0.833 (95%CI, 0.792 to 0.874) and 1.543 (95%CI, 1.494 to 1.592) years of PhenoAgeaccel, respectively. There was interaction between the genetic risk and sleep quality (P-interaction<0.001). For combined effect, compared to the group with high sleep quality and lower genetic risk, people with low sleep quality and high genetic risk had 2.747 (95%CI, 2.602 to 2.892) years higher PhenoAgeaccel.

CONCLUSION: Our findings elucidate that better sleep quality could lessen accelerated biological ageing especially among population with high genetic risk.

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How Genes and Sleep Quality Together Relate to Faster Biological Aging

Abstract

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