To stave off dementia, should you sleep an extra 30 minutes or exercise?
To stave off dementia, should you sleep an extra 30 minutes or exercise?
To stave off dementia, should you sleep an extra 30 minutes or exercise?
Some cuts from the article:
They found that individuals with very short sleep, high inactivity and low moderate to vigorous activity had the highest rates of dementia and evidence of accelerated brain ageing on MRI.
How to stave off dementia when you’re a short sleeper
To figure out your optimal ratio, we should start with a baseline understanding of our sleep.
For instance, are you a short sleeper (who gets less than six hours of sleep) or a normal sleeper (who gets between six and nine hours)?
If you’re a short sleeper, the study found that increasing sleep duration was associated with a lowering of dementia risk when at the expense of inactivity or light activity, but not when at the expense of moderate to vigorous physical activity.
Specifically, increasing sleep by 30 minute instead of engaging in inactivity or light activity was associated with a 9 per cent and 19 per cent reduction in dementia risk, respectively.