Most of what we hear about sleep deals with the health issues of not enough sleep. Lesser publicized are risks of too much sleep. Researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio examined nearly two thousand elderly participants in the long-term Framingham Heart Study. It showed more than nine hours of sleep per night was associated with lower cognitive performance. Those associations were stronger in people with symptoms of depression. The article in the journal Alzheimer’s and
Dementia also observed long but not short sleep duration was linked to specific cognitive abilities like impaired memory, visuospatial skills and executive functions.