Excessive daytime sleepiness in older adults may be a symptom of health issues like sleep apnea, cognitive impairment, or cardiovascular issues.
Boredom, depression, chronic pain and/or nutritional deficiencies can be some of the underlying causes that account for excessive daytime sleeping. Medications can also be a problem.
The Causes of Excessive Sleep
Poor sleep quality at night. Side effects of medication. Emotional challenges like depression or anxiety. Lack of emotional stimulation leading to boredom.
Providing the person doesn't appear to be uncomfortable or distressed, then sleeping more during the day isn't normally a reason to be worried. However, if a person is lying down in bed and asleep for most of the time they will need to be looked after to make sure they don't develop any physical health problems.
According to their internal body clock, most older adults need to go to sleep around 7 p.m. or 8 p.m. and wake up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. Many people fight their natural inclination to sleep and choose to go to bed several hours later instead.
Excessive daytime sleepiness in older adults may be a symptom of health issues like sleep apnea, cognitive impairment, or cardiovascular issues. Sleep Apnea: Obstructive sleep apnea can cause pauses in breathing during sleep.
For people over the age of 65, getting more than nine hours of sleep on a regular basis may be an early sign of the onset of dementia or Alzheimer's disease, a new study suggests.
While a 30- to 90-minute nap in older adults appears to have brain benefits, anything longer than an hour and a half may create problems with cognition, the ability to think and form memories, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.
CLEVELAND – A recent study has found that older adults who regularly nap for more than an hour a day had a 40% higher risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.
Ageing, an inevitable process, is commonly measured by chronological age and, as a convention, a person aged 65 years or more is often referred to as 'elderly'.
Age, Life Cycle and Evaluations of Personal Life
Fully 71% of those under age 50 expect their lives to be better in 10 years than they are today, as do 46% of those ages 50-64. By contrast, only about a fifth of adults ages 75 and older (19%) expect their lives to be better in the future than they are today.
If you have concerns about sleeping more than 9 hours nightly or not getting enough sleep (less than 6 hours), you should contact your healthcare provider to discuss your individual health needs. How can you know if you should be concerned? Watch for these signs of too little or poor sleep quality: Daytime sleepiness.
Your Bones, Joints, and Muscles
Your muscles get weaker, and the tendons -- which connect muscles to your skeleton -- get stiffer. This will decrease your strength and flexibility. In your 70s, you might lose an inch or two off your height as disks in your back flatten.
Too much sleep on a regular basis can increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and death according to several studies done over the years. Too much is defined as greater than nine hours. The most common cause is not getting enough sleep the night before, or cumulatively during the week.
How much water do you need to stay hydrated? As a general rule, you should take one-third of your body weight and drink that number of ounces in fluids. For example, if you weigh 150 pounds, aim to drink 50 ounces of water each day.
The most unhappy time of your life is your forties, according to a phenomenon known as the “u-shaped” curve which states that happiness bottoms out around your forties then trends back up as you grow older.
Late adulthood. The eighth and final stage of life is late adulthood. This stage refers to any individual who is older than sixty-five years old.
According to the research, the average American starts feeling old at the age of 47. Similarly, the average respondent starts to really worry about age-related bodily changes around 50 years old.
Australia's older generation (those aged 65 and over) continues to grow in number and as a share of the population. The ageing of the population creates both pressures and opportunities for Australia's health and welfare sectors.
Middle-aged respondents cited 70 as the start of old age while those 65 and older put the number closer to 74.
Is it normal to have aches and pains with age? Unfortunately, yes. We can expect to experience body aches and pains as we grow older.
But getting older doesn't automatically sideline you from being active. Usually, our energy declines because of normal changes. Both genes and environment lead to alterations in cells that cause aging muscles to lose mass and strength and to become less flexible. As a result, strenuous activities become more tiring.