Less Sleep and a Longer Life, a Desirable Mutation

Source https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/05/less-sleep-and-a-longer-life-a-desirable-mutation/

A person who sleeps six hours rather than eight hours every day, give or take, is effectively gaining a bonus 12.5% additional time spent alive and active. From that perspective, there isn’t all that much difference between being able to sleep two hours less every night throughout life, without consequences, and being able to live for the better part of an additional decade in good health. There are mutations that produce this effect in humans, other mammals, and lower animals such as flies, and at least one of them does so without any apparent negative side-effects.

Today’s open access paper offers an exploration of one of these mutations, a small alteration in DEC2, which not only reduces the need for sleep, thereby granting additional subjective life span, but is also found to…

Source https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2023/05/less-sleep-and-a-longer-life-a-desirable-mutation/

A person who sleeps six hours rather than eight hours every day, give or take, is effectively gaining a bonus 12.5% additional time spent alive and active. From that perspective, there isn’t all that much difference between being able to sleep two hours less every night throughout life, without consequences, and being able to live for the better part of an additional decade in good health. There are mutations that produce this effect in humans, other mammals, and lower animals such as flies, and at least one of them does so without any apparent negative side-effects.

Today’s open access paper offers an exploration of one of these mutations, a small alteration in DEC2, which not only reduces the need for sleep, thereby granting additional subjective life span, but is also found to…

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