How sleep changes over one's lifetime

Changes in sleep with aging

Dr. Solet explained that with age, sleep becomes lighter with more night awakenings. Sleep latency is how long it takes you to fall asleep—this doesn’t change much with aging. CFS and FM patients complain that they have trouble falling asleep, so that they have increased sleep latency.

What does change in aging is WASO, and as age creeps up, waking becomes more frequent and then it is a question of how the person handles that and how they help themselves get back to sleep. REM only decreases somewhat with aging.

What changes the most dramatically is restorative sleep, the deepest sleep. The proportion of deep sleep lessens with age. Dr. Solet believes the secret to the fountain of youth could be in finding a way to increase this deep slow-wave sleep.

Sleep efficiency is defined as the proportion of Time in Bed (TIB) to Total Sleep Time (TST). Typically activity and morning light exposure are sleep enhancing, but if you stay in because you are ill, you are not getting either of those.

With CFS and FM patients, post-extertional malaise has to be considered and activity measured.

Adulthood effects on sleep

Dr. Solet showed a slide that presented some of the issues effecting sleep in adulthood. It listed the following:

•  Menstrual cycles can effect sleep efficiency
•  By the age of 20-30 years old, deep sleep diminishes by about half and continues to diminish with age
•  Self-care opportunities may decline
•  Family and work responsibilities peak
•  Incidence of sleep disorders increases
•  For women, hot flashes during menopause can disrupt sleep
•  Daily life structure can be lost with illness and/or retirement
•  TIB may increase while TST decreases
•  Physical activity and light exposure may become limited
•  Pain and medications may effect sleep