Excessive daytime napping in older adults is associated with higher mortality rates, which researchers suggest may serve as a warning sign for underlying diseases, according to a study conducted by Harvard in partnership with Rush University Medical Center.
Quantifying the Risk of Napping
The research utilized data from the Rush Memory and Aging Project, which began in 1997 to study neurodegeneration and cognition in older adults in northern Illinois. Starting in 2005, participants wore wrist monitors for 10 days to provide objective measurements of nap timing, frequency, length, and day-to-day variability.
By 2025, researchers had analyzed follow-up statistics from 1,338 participants, all of whom were in retirement and older than 56. The findings indicated that both more frequent and longer naps were linked to increased mortality. Specifically, each additional nap per day was associated with a 7 percent higher mortality risk, while each additional hour of daytime napping per day was associated with a roughly 13 percent higher mortality risk.
However, not all napping was linked to these risks. Chenlu Gao, a researcher on the study, stated that naps within one hour per day are most likely benign. For participants whose ages were mostly in the early 80s, the average nap duration was about 50 minutes, with an average of two naps per day.
Napping as a Health Indicator
Gao clarified that the findings do not suggest that napping causes poor health outcomes. Instead, she described naps as a reflection of health conditions.
While acute illnesses like the flu produce visible symptoms alongside fatigue, some older adults may experience excessive daytime sleepiness without obvious symptoms, masking the conditions causing the fatigue.
To avoid interfering with nighttime rest, Gao suggests limiting naps to 20 minutes and finishing them before 2 or 3 p.m.
Sleep Patterns in the “Oldest-Old” Women
A separate study published in the journal Communications Medicine focused on “oldest-old” women—those in their 80s and 90s—to examine how changes in circadian rhythms and sleep-wake patterns relate to all-cause and cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality. This study included 704 White women from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures, with a mean age of 82.5 years at the first sleep visit between 2002 and 2004.
Researchers identified three distinct profiles of longitudinal change over a five-year period:
- Stable Sleep (SS): Minimal changes or improvements across parameters, seen in approximately 44% of participants.
- Increasing Sleepiness (IS): Characterized by substantial increases in nap frequency and duration.
- Declining Nighttime Sleep (DNS): Characterized by worsening nighttime sleep patterns.
During a median follow-up of 2.1 years after the second sleep visit, 90 deaths occurred, including 35 from CVD. Participants in the IS or DNS profiles had approximately twice the hazard of all-cause mortality compared to the SS group. After full adjustment, the DNS profile was associated with CVD mortality (HR 2.60, 95% CI: 1.03-6.57), though the IS profile was not.
Long-term Cardiovascular Implications
That study found that women with poor sleep at age 40 were likely to experience two more years of compromised cardiovascular health compared to healthy sleepers, while men experienced more than two years.
Dr. Bo-Huei Huang, the study’s lead author, noted that clinically diagnosed sleep-related breathing disorders, such as sleep apnea, resulted in a loss of over seven years of cardiovascular-disease free life among participants in a UK study where the average life expectancy was around 80 years.
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