A new study from researchers at the Karolinska Institutet found that bad sleep doesn’t just leave you groggy, desperately crawling toward your third cup of coffee before noon. It might also be slowly rotting your brain, causing it—and, in turn, you—to rapidly age.

Researchers analyzed MRI scans and sleep data from over 27,000 adults in the UK, ages 40 to 70. They found that people with poor sleep habits had brains that looked significantly older than their actual age. The difference was measurable biological ageing.

The team fed a machine over a thousand markers from MRI scans to estimate “brain age,” training it on scans from healthy people. Then they ran it against the full participant pool. They found that for every one-point drop in sleep quality, brain age advanced by about six mont

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