Maybe you’ve had a recent health scare. Perhaps someone you love was diagnosed with cancer. Or maybe you’ve worked hard, raised a family and are now looking forward to enjoying your golden years.
No matter your reason for being increasingly concerned about your health, you may be able to make your years last longer.
In an interesting Canadian study, depression was linked to an increased risk of premature death.
Depression therefore known as predictor of life expectancy.
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A new research paper published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry has figured out a novel association between getting up earlier and a reduced risk of depression.
The key finding shows that getting up just one hour earlier could cut a person’s risk of major depression by 23 percent.
To further study this hypothesis, and prove the optimal time for rising, lead author Dr. Iyas Daghlas, collected data from the DNA testing company 23 and Me and the biomedical database UK Biobank.
Dr. Daghlas then with the help of “Mendelian randomization” pulled genetic associations to help decipher cause and effect.
Our genetics are set at birth so some of the biases that affect other kinds of epidemiological research tend not to affect genetic studies.
details Daghlas, who graduated in May from Harvard Medical School.
More than 340 common genetic variants, including variants in the so-called “clock gene” PER2, are recognized to affect a person’s chronotype, and genetics collectively describes 12-42 percent of our sleep timing preference.
Chronotype is the natural impulse of your body to sleep at a certain time, or what most people know as being an early bird versus a night owl.
Scientists assessed de-identified genetic data on these variants from up to 850,000 individuals, including data from 85,000 who had worn sleep trackers for seven days and 250,000 who had filled out sleep-preference questionnaires.
This provided them a more clear picture, down to the hour, of how variants in genes influence when we sleep and wake up.
In the largest of these samples, about a third of surveyed subjects self-identified as morning larks, 9% were night owls and the rest were in the middle.
They found that each one-hour earlier sleep midpoint (halfway between bedtime and wake time) corresponded with a 23 percent lower risk of major depressive disorder.
This suggests that if someone who normally goes to bed at 1am, goes to bed at midnight instead and sleeps the same duration, they could cut their risk by 23 percent; if they go to bed at 11pm, they could cut it by about 40 percent.
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It’s unclear from the study whether those who are already early risers could benefit from getting up even earlier.
But for those in the intermediate range or evening range, shifting to an earlier bedtime would likely be helpful.
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