Sunday Science by Go UnPro Sleep and Aging and Cancer 2026_08_16

https://youtu.be/PxyjBDCFPCM

Welcome to Sunday Science, where we dive into a few recent scientific articles and their translation into our modern lives. Here is your host, Brent W. Laartz, M.D.

Alright everyone, welcome to another Sunday Science Go by GoUnPro, the,... study and multiple different studies. So this is going to be really a fly-by-night thing here. We're going to be looking through six different studies regarding sleep. This is my subject that I am really delving into my own life over the next month because I'm really going to delve in deep into my sleep because I think I've really tried to do a lot of different things to improve my sleep, and I feel like my sleep is really good in the fact that I'm a deep sleeper. I get to sleep really well. Only occasionally do I wake up in the middle of the night.

Only occasionally do I kind of ruminate things. I really fall asleep the minute I hit the pillow, but here's the deal. Obviously, I'm a physician, right? And I have a hundred other different things I do as evidenced by these podcasts, right? I have to set up these podcasts of what I'm doing to bring about my change for a better, for an unprocessed life. I've got to really delve in deep in that about how I'm performing that and how I'm accomplishing that. Then I've got these Sunday sciences, and I've been trying to get these done every week. I'll tell you, it's difficult, especially I work seven days on, seven days off. My sleep is much better.

My productivity in these kind of things is much better when I'm not working in the hospital 12, 13, 14 hours a day. And so it's been a challenge to keep this up every week. But I've really done a really great job this past month. Okay, so what do we have to owe to this next part, right? I sleep well, but I don't get enough sleep. I, especially on my weeks on, I have to be up at 5.30, 5 o'clock, 5.30, 6 o'clock at the latest. And I really found that I'm only getting between five and a half and six hours of sleep. And that's too little.

So what we're really going to delve into deeply is how is that affecting me? And then why do I need to change? OK, so part of this Sunday science is going to delve into why I need to change. OK, so we're going to go over six different studies. we have, first of all, a sleep chart of biological aging. And this is the multi-consortium, okay? This is in Nature, 2026. This study by, it's the multi-consortium, the Last author is Junhao Wen. This is Nature 2026 and this is published July 2026. This is

let's pull up the actual nature 2026 it just says nature sleep chart of biological aging clocks in middle and late life nature 2026 we don't have an actual issue date but that is in our our show notes here. And what they showed in different biological age gaps is that there is a U-shaped curve for sleep. And these biological clocks, and most of these biological clocks, nine of them, at least a U-shaped curve. And some of them have a more linear fashion, but some of them are U-shaped. Why is that?

And it may be that if you get too little sleep, there may be some health issues to begin with to cause that biological aging to be that way, or your sleep is causing that too little sleep, too much sleep. And that could be a problem with. some other issue. Either you have some obstructive sleep apnea or something like that is causing you to have poor sleep, but actually have higher amount of sleep because of that need for the increased sleep duration. So the long sleep duration, eight greater than eight hours, actually had also a worsening of biological age gaps. And this

This time around in Sunday Science, I don't have any of these graphics for you, but I can tell you the graphics would have been a little bit difficult to see anyway because the graphics were really small in this article, but you can take for granted. Take my word for it these many of these were u-shaped where the sleep duration less than eight hours was poorly performing in that biological aging clock and they did 23 of these different biological aging clocks and proteomics and above eight hours to 10 hours eight to 10 hours also was poor okay so less than six greater than 8, bad, somewhere between 6 and 8, and maybe centering around that 8 time frame, 6 or 8.

And it seems to be the better situation for biological aging clocks. OK, so and again, then they went through different systems and and had a good showing there. So, OK, so now we've got a. overall bird's eye view of this and really just biological aging clock chart and these proteomics that they measured and showed that uh so that it could be a hormesis or a um or u-shaped curve okay so and what came first chicken or the egg is it the fact that they got less sleep or was it already poor aging, the fact that they were getting a little sleep, and the same thing about the other way around. But I think that there's probably both ways around this, okay?

So let's go on to the next thing, and let's, all right, so then let's look into one of the issues have you ever been sleep deprived gotten four hours of sleep let's say the other day i had to do a lecture for some residents and so i hadn't prepared the lecture so i stayed up till 2 a.m to get the lecture performed was up at 5 30 to get to work to see patients in the hospitals did the lecture at noon finished that and kind of in between there felt more hungry, right? And have you ever had that where you felt like you were tired and therefore needed to eat?

Well, this study and this actually next second study too, but this first study, and actually there are a few other studies also showing this kind of thing. There is also a meta-analysis that did not show a difference, but here's this study by Von Egmond. And this is. the effects of acute sleep loss on leptin, ghrelin, and adiponectin in adults with healthy weight and obesity. So what they did was they took 44 participants, 19 of those were obese, 20 of them were women, and they did a crossover design, including one night of sleep deprivation deprivation, and one night of sleep that was normal in the lab.

After each night, they did a fasting blood, and after sleep deprivation, fasting levels of leptin were lower versus those with sleep. Okay, so those with a good eight-hour sleep, and they really did a lot of controls here. All of them ate the exact same meal. All of them played the same exact games in the evening in the sleep lab. And they also did some different... sleep polysomnography so they actually for sure made for sure that those people actually slept that duration instead of uh you know self-reporting um and so that difference was seven percent uh lower in those persons with sleep deprivation and then those with ghrelin and adiponectin were higher in those patients who also had this sleep deprivation.

So leptin is the hormone of satiety and ghrelin is that of kind of hunger and adiponectin is a similar compound. The changes in Leptin and adiponectin following sleep loss were more pronounced among women, and the ghrelin increase was stronger among those with obesity, whereas the sleep loss-induced increase in adiponectin was more marked among normal weight loss or normal weight participants. All right, so the difference there was 10% higher, no, 12% higher amount of ghrelin in those with sleep loss, and it was higher in obese, as we just said. The increase in adiponectin was 10%, and it was especially in normal weight.

right so again here the satiety hormone less the hunger hormone is higher in those with sleep loss with basically they made those people stay up all night versus someone with eight hours so all right so the next one on the next article we're going to be going through is nettle cheva and et al and penev these are they're from the university of chicago insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity and what they did here they had 14 days of moderate caloric caloric restriction with eight points 5 or 5.5 hours of nighttime sleep. So this was a prospective study. And they had 10 overweight non-smoking adults who are trying to lose weight, 14 days of moderate caloric restriction.

And they looked to see after that 14 days, how the weight loss occurred okay so they did body weight composition they did hormone measurements and the data analysis showed that they Mean sleep duration was reduced by 131 minutes per day from during the eight and a half hour time in bed condition to five point five hours. 14 minutes during the 5.5 hour time in bed condition um and when that time in bed was restricted to five and a half hours subjects went to bed later usually and got out of bed earlier okay so the body weight and composition um They consumed similar energy levels, 1,447 versus 1,450 kilocalories per day.

So 1,447 calorie a day for these people who are moderately obese during both conditions. The caloric content, carbohydrate, fat, and protein contributed were similar in both. Both treatments were accompanied by comparable weight loss, approximately 3 kilograms. Okay, so about 7 pound weight loss. However, more than half of the weight loss during the 8 1⁄2 time in bed condition and only a quarter of the weight loss during the 8 1⁄2 time in bed condition. loss during the 5.5 hours time in bed condition was fat so so again more than half versus only a quarter of the way loss was fat. So of that, we're talking about seven pounds again, right?

So seven pounds and over half of that, let's call it four pounds, was fat in the eight and a half hour time in bed versus only a quarter. So let's call that less than two pounds. So less than half of the amount of fat loss in the people who were sleep deprived slightly. Now these are 5.5 hours versus 8.5 hours. So it's really not 5.5 hours and not sleep restricted to my knowledge, but it is sleep restricted enough. Okay. So instead sleep restriction resulted in considerable increased loss of fat free body mass when compared to the eight and a half hour. hour time in bed condition, 60% increase. So 1.5 versus 2.4 kilograms

in the eight and a half versus 5.5 hours. So about an extra pound of fat-free weight loss. So fat-free weight loss, you take as being lean mass. loss, right? So you lost a lot more fat when you slept better and you lost a lot less lean body mass. So a lot less, perhaps if you increase that enough, you could have sarcopenia in the sleep restricted weight loss category if you lost that much lean body. mass. Okay. So the differential loss of fat between the two sleep conditions was accompanied by changes in several secondary endpoints, increased hunger during the period of sleep restriction. So these people were hungrier and increased hunger in the people who were

let's see, higher fasting and postprandial RQ. They had higher ghrelin concentrations and hence the hunger, right? And in contrast, resting metabolic rate and 24-hour plasma epinephrine concentrations were lower at the end of the 5.5 hours compared to the 8.5 hours. So resting metabolic rate and epinephrine concentrations were lower. if you were sleep restricted, okay, so again, what do you want, you want your metabolic rate to be higher, right, so this actually resulted in that, also leptin concentration declined parallel with the loss of weight and adiposity, okay, so without a significant independent effective sleep loss. There were no differences in the fractional thermic effect of food, 24-hour norepinephrine, cortisol, growth hormone, thyroid hormone in this study.

So interesting study that not only was it increasing lean body mass loss in the sleep restricted persons. it was a decrease in the amount of fat loss, and it was a decrease in the metabolic rate and the plasma epinephrine concentration. Okay, so interesting study. All right, so again, that study was in the Annals of Internal Medicine. This is actually quite a ways back in the past, 2010, 16 years ago, but just interesting study I saw there that I wanted to include since it kind of went along right along with this leptin and ghrelin study that we talked about. Okay, so the next part that I want to get into is something that we're finding increasing evidence for. And this article here was from

uh, 20, uh, we also, um, so this article is for 2020. Um, it's called sleep quality and risk of cancer findings of the English longitudinal study of aging. OK, so this study had a relatively simple study, but it did have this 10,000 participants and they whittled it down to 7,000 or 740. 745 participants developing cancer at eight-year follow-up out of those 10,000, okay? So 745 developing cancer, and they had at least... A certain number had filled out the study method. Let's see here. They took out 538 that had baseline cancer. They had a good quality out of those 10,000. They had a four-question questionnaire. Really pretty simple, right? Not a very...

Rigorous questionnaire, but you either had a very good, good quality, intermediate or poor quality sleep score on that. And then they had immediate follow up of eight years. And out of those, remember, I said 745 developed cancer of those and 538 had baseline cancer. So they were excluded. There were 476 without data on the sleep quality. So. All right. So what they found in this was that. 32% increased risk with a baseline score. If you took just a baseline score, if you had an intermediate score versus the good score, 32% increased risk for cancer. And if you had poor sleep, you had a 56% increased risk of cancer.

And then if you actually maintain, they did another questionnaire, four years, again, this is an eight-year study, right, eight years follow-up, 61% increase in cancer if you maintained an intermediate score for sleep deprivation or a poor score, either one that was approximately 61, it was 60 point something and 61%. increased risk of cancer just because you had a poor sleep score or an intermediate score. So you really have to have a good score to suggest. that you had a decreased risk in cancer, not a decreased risk, but a decrease compared to those others. Again, these people who had a good score were actually the baseline level, right? So they didn't have anything to compare that to. Then that...

was an interesting study and again I don't have any graphics for this but but this next study is just a review article and it shows and it goes back a ways also this is from 2010 it's called shift work and cancer this is from um the this is a german article i think um university of kong and let's see this is This was published in Dofsch Arshtabel in 2010. I'll put the article. in the show notes. But this is a review on shift work and cancer. And it just was a good way to show this meta-analysis of the risk of breast cancer in flight personnel. And depending on all studies, there were some cohort studies, there were some case control studies.

In general, if you took all studies for breast cancer, about 1.7 times the risk if you were a flight personnel. And prostate cancer was about 1.4 times the risk. Okay, so then again, then there was another study, a meta-analysis of shift workers for the risk of breast cancer. And with 1.5 times the relative risk, so about 40% to 50% increased risk of cancer, of breast cancer, in shift workers. So that one, these studies compared a shift worker versus a normal daytime worker in the same factory, okay? So these were... In Europe, North America, multiple different studies. I think there were seven different studies, okay?

So this is just a review, a really good review about the fact that shift work, which is basically the evidence of it, is getting light and having to work. during a time when it, that is opposite of the time that your biological clock tells you you should be sleeping, which is, um, and, um, because of this, some, uh, some world health organization and a few other health organizations have deemed shift work to be a cancerous, uh, causing, um, Carcinogen. OK, so. All right. So. All right. So we've got a couple of kind of caveats here to say that there might be a cause effect of at least a correlation of poor sleep. poor circadian management, and cancer, okay?

So, all right, so the next thing we're going to go through is potentially one of the reasons why poor sleep might affect cancer, because this is a study showing sleep fatigue and NK cell, those are natural killer cells.

activity in healthy volunteers and this is one of a few different studies these are really starting to come out now this is from 2006 this past decade they've really and that's obviously 20 years ago but this last decade we've really been starting to determine that the natural cell activity may be the reason why there is some increased risk of cancer here because your natural killer cells are those cells that go around looking and finding foreign cells could be bacterial could be cancer cells that are out of control and bringing those out of the circulation. So these natural killer cell activity. So what they found was they took patients who were, it was a cross-sectional study, and they had

All right, so in this study, they took 60 healthy women. They were part of a larger psychobiological study of women, and they were recently screened for breast cancer. So to be eligible, they had to be 25 years of age or older. They provided informed consent, obviously. They were excluded if they were pregnant. and if they had a history of neoplasm already. At the completion of the study, 15 women were excluded, four because they didn't fully complete the questionnaires. 11 due to incomplete values or technical problems with the NK assay. So the final analysis was conducted on the remaining 45 women. So 60 women started, 45, that's quite a bit of a decrease in fallouts, but they didn't differ in duration of sleep apparently.

They were in an inner city cancer screening area. This was done in New York, it seems, New York City. And so they did some questionnaires based on fatigue and sleep quality. And then also, obviously, the natural killer cell. activity okay so um they had two sessions with regard to the natural killer cell activity the amount of sleep and the level of fatigue so two different time frames and those time frames were four weeks apart. So they were scheduled four weeks apart. So, uh, the final sample, uh, was 45, I said. Um, and the two sessions didn't, uh, differ on levels of, uh, natural killer cell activity, sleep, uh, fatigue, or, um, or, or VAS fatigue, two different, uh, studies.

However, there was a large variability within the subjects. So there was a little bit of a variability in the second session. So the analysis of these patients showed that that the increase in natural killer cell activity with increasing sleep, and if there was a change of sleep at all. So the preceding night was positively related. So if you had an increase in sleep, you had an increase in natural killer cells. activity. The relationship with that delta sleep two nights preceding the blood draw was not related to natural killer cell activity. A trend was apparent for fatigue, but it was not significant. Okay. So again, so increase in natural killer cell activity with increased sleep. All

It'll be interesting to see what other potential studies we can find that would show us some different relationships between these and the increased risk of cancer with decreased sleep as well. Potentially, there could be also there. some increased inflammation and or other activity that we didn't see in the other study. That first study had, again, we saw no increase in cortisol. However, there is some change with poor sleep. There is some change in microbiome and with diet and with, as we said, the hunger hormones. Okay, so the last study we're going to do is in current biology, and it's a meta-analysis of the associations between insufficient sleep duration and antibody response to vaccination.

So here, they did a meta-analysis of 165 studies, whittled down to 19 different studies reviewed, and then there were another 12. studies excluded because it was not quite having the right outcomes of interest. And they whittled that down. So down, down to seven eligible studies, four experimental studies, three prospective studies. Okay. And they showed that there was a relationship between self-reported sleep and vaccine response. Um, okay. So, um, and that, uh, that increased response, uh, had an effect size of, uh, 0.29. And then there was some, uh, And so that didn't reach significance. However, the objective sleep duration and response to vaccination did reach significance and had an effect size of 0.79. And that was in the

seven and the experimental ones were 0.86. Okay. Um, in men, there was a better, uh, response to the objective, uh, sleep duration and the overall effect size in women was, uh, 0.42 and crossed the zero, uh, barrier and therefore it was not significant in women. All right. So significant finding there, perhaps not so much in women as men. But however, overall, when all were said, all was said and done, the objective sleep duration showed an increased response, actually approximately more than almost double the response to vaccination.

The pooled effect size was large and highly significant for men, whereas it was smaller and not significant for women, likely due to wide variations in sex hormone levels, they said in the article, according to the phase of menstrual cycle, use of hormonal contraception, use of hormonal replacement or other. It's hard to say exactly why that was the case. Okay, so those are our six studies we're talking today about, and I could have included an article on microbiome, and as you know, that's one of my... pet studies is to look at microbiome.

And so we went through six studies showing that increasing sleep, at least a normal amount of sleep, at least between six and eight hours, probably that seven to eight hours is the key. um, multiple different aging parameters. And then a study by Von Eggman that showed a decrease in leptin, increase in ghrelin and an increase in adiponectin. with patients who were showing having decreased sleep. Then also insufficient sleep undermined the dietary efforts to lose weight. And the people who had less sleep had more lean mass moss. more lean mass loss and they also, um, had less fat loss. Okay. So, um, and then also increased risk of cancer with decreased sleep quality score, uh, shift work showing a, an increased risk of cancer.

And then also the D increased, um, natural killer cell activity with an improved sleep score. Okay. So, um, all right, so that's it for this week and this all part of my reasonings for now saying. OK, now I know that I've done this and this and this to try to improve my sleep. And I think that I've had some successes there. But now I just need to bite the bullet and say, hey, if I go to bed at 11 o'clock, I'm going to have to at least sleep until 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. and try to get at least seven hours of sleep. OK, so. 7 to 8 hours.

That's going to be my metric from now on to try to get 7 or 8 hours. And I'm going to count it as 7 to 8. And so I'm going to have that metric as a measurable effect to track the number of days that I get less than seven hours. Okay. So let's, uh, let's track that from now on because of these studies, these studies like this suggest. that we can improve our biological aging, our hunger and satiety hormones. There's also some studies about insulin sensitivities and cortisol. And then now we've talked about cancer and natural killer cells.

And we've talked about the... um immune system and the response to vaccination being improved as well so all right so thanks for joining us on sunday science i know this was not our little show and tell with all of our graphs today we didn't have a lot of graphs to to demonstrate today but again follow us on our go on pro.com follow us on substack youtube and you can see us on apple podcasts you can see us video on spotify okay and then anywhere else you can find your audio podcast, you'll be able to see us as well. Thank you very much for joining us again. We'll talk to you soon. Love you guys.

Love what you're listening to me to try to learn, but also get out there and do some of your own research. It's so easy to use some of these either could be just Google could be your any AI that you might use to find articles. Don't just use AI to say, tell me about this. Tell your AI to find you articles about whatever subject you want, and then go through those articles. Find a review article. Those are some of the best, right? Some of the review articles will really teach you some overview of what you need to know, but then also It's going to potentially show you where other studies where you might be able to get some of your information.

Do not get your information from places that are just telling you that this is good for you and this is bad for you. Go to places that are like me. Hopefully there's a lot of other people out there giving you the studies, bringing you the experts to tell you about the studies. I love those kind of podcasts too. And that's the kind of podcasts I listen to. So thanks for joining me. We'll see you next Sunday.

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 ARTICLES

The MULTI Consortium., O’Toole, C.K., Song, Z. et al. Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life. Nature (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10524-5 

van Egmond LT, Meth EMS, Engström J, et al. Effects of acute sleep loss on leptin, ghrelin, and adiponectin in adults with healthy weight and obesity: A laboratory study. Obesity (Silver Spring). 2023;31(3):635‐641. doi:10.1002/oby.23616

Nedeltcheva AV, Kilkus JM, Imperial J, Schoeller DA, Penev PD. Insufficient sleep undermines dietary efforts to reduce adiposity. Ann Intern Med. 2010 Oct 5;153(7):435-41. doi: 10.7326/0003-4819-153-7-201010050-00006. PMID: 20921542; PMCID: PMC2951287. 

Song, C., Zhang, R., Wang, C., et al. (2020). Sleep quality and risk of cancer: findings from the English longitudinal study of aging. Sleep, 44. 

Shift Work and Cancer The Evidence and the Challenge Thomas C. Erren, Puran Falaturi, Peter Morfeld, Peter Knauth,  Russel J. Reiter, Claus Piekarski.  Dtsch Arztebl Int 2010; 107(38): 657–62 DOI: 10.3238/arztebl.2010.0657

Keren Shakhar, Heiddis B. Valdimarsdottir, Josephine S. Guevarra, Dana H. Bovbjerg,

Sleep, fatigue, and NK cell activity in healthy volunteers: Significant relationships revealed by within subject analyses, Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, Volume 21, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 180-184,

Spiegel K, Rey A, Cheylus A ...A meta-analysis of the associations between insufficient sleep duration and antibody response to vaccination.  Current Biology, 33, 998-1005.e2