Approved Research

The determinants of sleep health and its composite influence on age-related cardiometabolic disease and neurodegenerative disease

Lay summary

Sleep health is facing huge challenge in modern society, meanwhile, discovering the important functions of sleep, understanding the influence of genetic and social-environmental factors in shaping sleep health, and improving clinical outcomes by considering the influence of sleep on other disease processes are increasingly the interest of study.

But sleep health, like proper nutrition, is not a unitary construct. Buysse has outlined six dimensions of sleep health, and these include sleep regularity, sleep satisfaction, daytime alertness, sleep timing, sleep efficiency and sleep duration, but literature that links sleep to health is frequently limited in a singular aspect of sleep, the interactions between sleep health variables should be considered actually.

So on the one hand, we aim to extract predictive risk factors which contains both genetic and environmental factors, in order to construct a sleep disorder diagnosis predictive model, including modifiable behaviors which are likely to be rectified.  On the other hand, we will link sleep health to age-related cardiometabolic disease and neurodegenerative disease from 6 different aspects, and these parts will finally be combined to create a global sleep score based on health and medical data, and the analysis of shared loci variants based on genetic data will also be done.

Our project will help to identify people that are at high risk,  enhance our mechanistic understanding of sleep disorder, and potentially provide evidenced-based sleep health advice, for prevention and treatment of age-related cardiometabolic disease and neurodegenerative disease. This project will take 3 years.