Older adults who lie awake for periods of 30 minutes or more during the night or experience other problematic sleeping patterns appear to have decreased longevity compared with their better-rested seniors, according to new research.

The results were published in Psychosomatic Medicine (Vol. 65, No. 1). Using EEG monitoring, Mary Amanda Dew, PhD, and her colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine examined data on the sleep patterns of 185 healthy seniors in eight different studies between 1981 and 1997. Of these participants, who ranged from 58 to 91 years old, 66 had died by the follow-ups, which occurred an average of 13 years after the sleep evaluations.

The study found that seniors who had periods of sleeplessness longer than 30 minutes, slept less than 80 percent of the monitoring time or had extremely high or low amounts of REM sleep were about twice as likely to have died by the follow-up date. The results were controlled for age, gender and presence of physical or mental illness.

"This study should highlight to physicians that it's important to ask older patients about their sleep...and in the case that there is a problem, see if there is something that can be done to help," says Martica Hall, PhD, psychiatry professor at the University of Pittsburgh and an author of the study. "We should think of sleep as a health behavior we can all choose to improve. Especially in our society, we tend to push it off to the side."

However, researchers are as yet uncertain whether certain sleep patterns cause higher mortality or if poor sleep reflects changes in brain functions related to mortality.

To test if sleep patterns do in fact affect longevity, Hall and other researchers from the department of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh plan to begin a program in which they will treat older adults with poor sleeping patterns using stress-management interventions. "The idea is that after improving their sleep, we'll also see better health," Hall says.

--J. KENNEDY