Role of sleep quality in the acceleration of biological aging and its potential for preventive interaction on air pollution insults: Findings from the UK Biobank cohort

Abstract

Sleep has been associated with aging and relevant health outcomes, but the causal relationship remains inconclusive. In this study, we investigated the associations of sleep behaviors with biological ages (BAs) among 363,886 middle and elderly adults from UK Biobank. Sleep index (0 [worst]-6 [best]) of each participant was retrieved from the following six sleep behaviors: snoring, chronotype, daytime sleepiness, sleep duration, insomnia, and difficulties in getting up. Two BAs, the KDM-biological age and PhenoAge, were estimated by corresponding algorithms based on clinical traits, and their residual discrepancies with chronological age were defined as the age accelerations (AAs). We first observed negative associations between the sleep index and the two AAs, and demonstrated that the change of AAs could be the consequence of sleep quality using Mendelian randomization with genetic risk scores of sleep index and BAs. Particularly, a one-unit increase in sleep index was associated with 0.104- and 0.119-year decreases in KDM-biological AA and PhenoAge acceleration, respectively. Air pollution is another key driver of aging. We further observed significant independent and joint effects of sleep and air pollution (PM_2.5 and NO₂ ) on AAs. Sleep quality also showed a modifying effect on the associations of elevated PM_2.5 and NO₂ levels with accelerated AAs. For instance, an interquartile range increase in PM_2.5 level was associated with 0.009-, 0.044-, and 0.074-year increase in PhenoAge acceleration among people with high (5-6), medium (3-4), and low (0-2) sleep index, respectively. Our findings elucidate that better sleep quality could lessen accelerated biological aging resulting from air pollution.

Keywords: PM2.5; aging; air pollution; biological age; sleep.