The Effects of Aging on Sleep Architecture in Healthy Subjects

Abstract

This chapter presents normative data on healthy sleep, as measured by polysomnography (PSG), from “supernormal” subjects across the age range from 20 to about 90 years. The data originates from the SIESTA project database established in the late 1990s. While that data has been published and used in research in many ways, the novelty of the current analysis is (a) the focus on normative data following the latest sleep staging standard (AASM 2012), and (b) the results after narrowing down the data set by excluding outliers due to disturbed sleep pattern that can occur in a sleep lab and are thus not examples of “normal” sleep. Results demonstrate interesting dependencies of sleep architecture on age, in particular a reduction in total sleep time and changes in sleep stage distributions toward lighter sleep, which differ in detail between the two genders.