“I would treat this as guidance,” said Junhao Wen, an assistant professor of radiology at Columbia University and lead author on the study. “The key point is consistent sleep time, around 6 to 8 hours per day. We know that’s going to do good for your overall health.”

Wen became interested in studying sleep because of a goal to improve his own shut-eye.

“I’m a light sleeper,” Wen said. “I’m a little bit concerned about my personal sleep quality.”

Wen’s lab has been at the forefront of developing biological aging clocks, which use biomedical data and machine learning to determine the physiological age of each organ.

“The hypothesis is that different organs, even within the same person, age at different rates,” Wen said.

Drawing on the UK Biobank, a longitudinal study involving 500,000 volunteers, Wen and his colleagues developed aging clocks for organs throughout the body to see if the aging of various parts of the body was linked to the amount of sleep.

Original source: ca