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Sleep is critical for your well being, and it unfortunately gets harder to get good sleep as you get older. There are techniques you can do to try to improve sleep. Many of the treatments we advocate for at our Biohackr Health Bay Area clinics are to help improve sleep. But if you can’t get good sleep and / or use medications to help you sleep what is the result?
This is a study published in April 2025 in Sleep, “Late life disability may increase with more frequent insomnia symptoms and sleep medications use over time.” The study looked at people over a 5 year period of time. Did they use sleep medications? Did they have insomnia?
- Data was from the National Health and Aging Trends study of 6722 patients
- Disability was defined using a disability index
- Insomnia symptoms: Average frequency of longer sleep onset “latency” or trouble staying asleep
- General sleep medication usage frequence was assessed.
- Analysis took into account health status, demographics, and risky health behaviors.
What is the disability index?
- Activities of daily living– can you bathe and dress yourself? Do you need help going to the bathroom or indoor transfers? Assistance with eating? Issues with incontinence?
- Instrumental activities of daily living are things like independently visiting neighbors shopping, making meals, laundry, walking 2 km, squatting and standing, riding public transportation.
- Physical performance– pick up a book from the floor, stand up from a chair, turn around 360, put your had behind your neck or lower back
- Cognition. Cognitive function including calculation, language, orientation, and recall
Findings?
It was significant. For every one unit higher in insomnia frequency or sleep medication usage, disability scores increased by 0.20 every year, even adjusting for covariables. Using sleep medications more often led to an even greater increase in disability scores than insomnia alone.
How can Biohackr Health help?
Our Biohackr Clinics in San Francisco and Palo Alto offer many strategies for improving sleep. Why do you have insomnia? Can it be helped with weight loss? hormone replacement? NAD? Exercise?
- Do you have sleep apnea? Read our blogs on the subject, but that is a testable thing. Sleep apnea leads to disordered sleep.
- Weight loss and GLP use may help improve sleep apnea. See our page on medical weight loss and read our blogs
- NAD. NAD levels decrease as you age, and they are thought to play an important role in sleep. You can test what your levels are in clinic, and we have a comprehensive program with IV NAD and oral NAD precursor NMN supplement to help. NAD Program, NMN supplement
- Brain Health. Sleep and brain health are also linked. BRAIN HEALTH
- Exercise. We are fans of creatine and building muscle as you age. Muscle levels have been linked to dementia risk.
MEDICAL CITATIONS:
Disability Index Development and Validation of the Disability Index Among Older Adults – PMC
NAD The Circadian NAD+ Metabolism: Impact on Chromatin Remodeling and Aging – PubMed