PROTECTING SLEEP QUALITY IN LATER LIFE

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Good sleep quality is important to continued adaptability, physical and mental health in late life. After age 75, however, loss of sleep continuity and depth accelerates, presaging diminished adaptability and decrements in health status. Protecting sleep quality in late life therefore may be important to continued healthy aging. We propose to test this hypothesis by examining the ability of sleep hygiene education and restriction of time in bed: (1) to slow or reverse age-dependent loss of sleep continuity and depth and thereby (2) to promote stability or improvement in daytime wellness, mental and physical health in the later years of life. In this revision of AgeWise Project 4, we will recruit 99 elders aged 275 without sleep-wake complaints, randomly assign them (33 per cell) to one of three conditions (education in healthy sleep practices ["education"], education in healthy sleep practices plus restriction of time in bed ["education" plus "restriction"] or an attentiononly control condition) and follow them for 30 months, measuring sleep, well being, and physical and mental health at baseline (T1), six months (T2), 18 months (T3), and 30 months (T4). We predict that the combined intervention condition ("education" plus "restriction") will be associated with preservation of better sleep quality and, hence, with better adaptation and health over 2.5 years than education in sleep practices alone or an attention-only control condition. We will employ random regression analyses to model long term trajectories in outcome measures of health, well being, and functional status associated with the three intervention conditions. In these analyses we will covary for the presence/absence of hormone replacement therapy, as well as for knowledge of sleep and expectancy effects. This prediction embodies the basic premise of the AgeWise program project, namely, that continued successful aging is promoted by protecting and enhancing sleep quality in late life. Program-wide research in this project will also test that more stable sleep-wake schedules and modest reductions in time in bed will in general be associated with better sleep, mental health, physical health and well being in the final years of life.