Why strict bed time is key to health

Adults who don't stick to a regular schedule are often less healthy, new research shows. Photo / 123RF

For most adults these days, achieving the goal of seven hours' sleep a night is a stretch.

And yet, scientists at Duke University in the US are here to add one more thing to your well-being to do list: set a strict bed time.

New research published yesterday in the journal Scientific Reports shows adults who don't stick to a regular schedule are often heavier, less healthy, with higher blood sugar levels and higher blood pressure.

The researchers said it wasn't clear whether those symptoms were the things that caused people to have more erratic sleep, or whether erratic sleep causes those symptoms.

"Perhaps all of these things are impacting each other," said Jessica Lunsford-Avery, PhD, an assistant professor in psychiatry and behavioural sciences and the study's lead author.

But either way, she concluded, after assessing 1978 people, striving for a solid seven hours between the same times every night can't hurt your chances of keeping your health in check. Lunsford-Avery's study gave each participant, aged 54 to 93, a device that tracked sleep specific to the minute, so her team could monitor the smallest of changes.

They found the regularity of a person's sleep was the best measure to predict a person's heart and metabolic disease risk.

The findings show an association - not a cause-and-effect relationship - between sleep regularity and heart and metabolic health.

Her team plans to conduct more, longer studies in hopes of determining how biology causes changes in sleep regularity and vice-versa.

"With more research, we hope to understand what's going on biologically, and perhaps then we could say what's coming first, or which is the chicken and which is the egg."