Sleep duration is increasingly recognized as a key determinant of systemic health and ageing. Sleep plays a fundamental role in maintaining metabolic, cardiovascular, immune, and neurological health. While both short and long sleep have been linked to adverse clinical outcomes, their effects on biological ageing across multiple organ systems remain incompletely understood. Emerging evidence suggests that disrupted sleep may accelerate ageing through mechanisms involving inflammation, metabolic dysregulation, neuroendocrine imbalance, and impaired tissue repair.
A large multi-omics study published in Nature investigated the relationship between sleep duration and organ-specific biological ageing using imaging, proteomic, metabolomic, genetic, and survival analyses. The findings demonstrated nonlinear, U-shaped associations between sleep duration and biological ageing across the brain, adipose tissue, liver, pancreas, heart, kidney, and immune systems, highlighting sleep as a systemic modulator of ageing and disease risk.
(Source: MULTI Consortium; O’Toole CK, Song Z, Anagnostakis F, Yang Z, Tian YE, Duggan MR, Zou C, Leng Y, Cai Y, Bai W, Fu CHY, Rafii MS, Aisen P, Wang G, De Jager PL, Zeng J, Oh HS, Zhou X, Walker KA, Belsky DW, Zalesky A, Simonsick EM, Resnick SM, Ferrucci L, Davatzikos C, Wen J. Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life. Nature. 2026 May 13. Doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-10524-5.)