If Grandpa occasionally dozes off in front of the TV or squeezes in a power nap after lunch, it’s probably no big deal. But if he can’t keep his eyes open at the breakfast table, even after a full night of sleep, that could be a red flag, according to researchers at Mass General Brigham.
In a new study published in partnership with Rush University Medical Center, excessive napping by older adults is linked with higher mortality rates, signaling a possible connection to underlying disease.
“We know that older people tend to nap a lot. And we do a lot of work on age-related diseases, so we were thinking napping could predict mortality in older adults,” said Chenlu Gao, a researcher in the MGB Department of Anesthesiology, and lead author of the study. Gao is also a research fellow in the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
“We had this great opportunity to collaborate with the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, who have a comprehensive data set,” said Gao. “Using this data set, we found that there is a connection between daytime napping and mortality in older adults.”
The Rush Memory and Aging Project, which began in 1997 as a cohort study looking at the cognition and neurodegeneration of older adults in northern Illinois, proved invaluable to Gao’s research. In 2005, the Rush project began having participants wear wrist monitors for 10 days to measure rest-activity data — allowing researchers to extract extensive information on nap length, frequency, timing, and day-to-day variability.
