ArticleNature human behaviour2023
No phenotypic or genotypic evidence for a link between sleep duration and brain atrophy.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Poor sleep is robustly correlated with accelerated aging but the evidence for causation is mixed.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Association of sleep duration with Alzheimer's disease and cognition.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Prediction of cognitive performance by demographics, sleep, and brain morphometry: machine learning findings from ENIGMA-Sleep Working Group.Research square · 2026Article
- Insomnia-Driven Hippocampal Atrophy: Evidence From Bidirectional Mendelian Randomization.Health science reports · 2026Article
- Can we predict sleep health based on brain features? A large-scale machine learning study using the UK Biobank.Brain communications · 2026Article
- Brain Age Acceleration on MRI Due to Poor Sleep: Associations, Mechanisms, and Clinical Implications.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Brain signature of sleep quality.Sleep · 2025Article
- Sleep Patterns and Human Brain Health.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2025Review
- Lower slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep are associated with brain atrophy of Alzheimer's disease-vulnerable regions.Journal of clinical sleep medicine : JCSM : official publication of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine · 2025Article
- Associations between objective sleep metrics and brain structure in cognitively unimpaired adults: interactions with sex and Alzheimer's biomarkers.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2025Article
- Anxious-depressive symptoms and sleep disturbances across the Alzheimer disease spectrum.Nature. Mental health · 2025Article
- Mendelian randomization study of self-reported long sleep duration, short sleep duration, and insomnia and cognitive function.PloS one · 2025Article
- Age- and sex-related differences in sleep patterns and their relations to self-reported sleep and mood.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2025Article
- Genetic evidence for the causal effects of C-reactive protein on self-reported habitual sleep duration.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2024Article
- Individual sleep need is flexible and dynamically related to cognitive function.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Is Short Sleep Bad for the Brain? Brain Structure and Cognitive Function in Short Sleepers.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- Restless nights, cold hearts: Poor sleep causally blunts empathy.International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHPArticle
- Memory-related default-executive coupling across the lifespan and associations with changes in cognitive control.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
24 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Short sleep is held to cause poorer brain health, but is short sleep associated with higher rates of brain structural decline? Analysing 8,153 longitudinal MRIs from 3,893 healthy adults, we found no evidence for an association between sleep duration and brain atrophy. In contrast, cross-sectional analyses (51,295 observations) showed inverse U-shaped relationships, where a duration of 6.5 (95% confidence interval, (5.7, 7.3)) hours was associated with the thickest cortex and largest volumes relative to intracranial volume. This fits converging evidence from research on mortality, health and cognition that points to roughly seven hours being associated with good health. Genome-wide association analyses suggested that genes associated with longer sleep for below-average sleepers were linked to shorter sleep for above-average sleepers. Mendelian randomization did not yield evidence for causal impacts of sleep on brain structure. The combined results challenge the notion that habitual short sleep causes brain atrophy, suggesting that normal brains promote adequate sleep duration-which is shorter than current recommendations.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.