Dozing off in your armchair in the middle of the afternoon is one of life's simple pleasures.
But depending on how often you find yourself doing it, those daytime naps could be a warning sign of worsening cognitive health, research suggests.
In a new study, researchers found seniors who napped frequently were significantly more likely to develop dementia over the next decade, compared to people who rarely or never napped.
The findings, published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, don't mean that napping is driving cognitive decline, but they identify napping as a risk factor for dementia that we should pay more attention to.
"More frequent napping could be a marker of changes in the brain, rather than a cause of brain changes that lead to dementia," says psychologist and sleep researcher Adam Spira from Johns Hopkins University.
In their study, Spira and fellow researchers analyzed data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS), a longitudinal survey of Medicare beneficiaries in the US aged 65 years and older.
The team examined data from 995 of the NHATS participants, all of whom answered questions about their napping habits as part of the research, and none of whom had probable or possible dementia at the outset of the study.
Over a median follow-up period of five years, 417 (41.9 percent) of the participants were classified as having developed possible or probable dementia since the commencement of the study.
After adjusting for a range of potential confounding factors in the data – including age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, smoking status, body mass index, and various health conditions and sleep factors – the researchers found that frequent nappers had the highest risk of developing the condition, compared to infrequent nappers and non-nappers.
