Dr. Matt Walker

But the older adult, they're not dressed in the same way that everyone else is dressed on the beach.

They are wrapped up.

Some of them have a woolen hat on.

Why?

Why?

Older adults cannot thermoregulate anywhere near as well as young adults.

Is that right?

And it's the reason that older adults will always be saying, I'm just so cold and my hands and my feet especially are always cold.

Now that's a problem for sleep.

Because if you cannot vasodilate at the level of your hands and your feet, you can't get the blood out from the core, you can't drop your core body temperature as much.

And we started to understand from those types of data that part of the aging sleep-related problem equation is not just that the brain deteriorates in sleep-related regions, which we've been doing most of our work on,

It's also part of a body equation and a thermoregulatory equation.

There was also a great study unrelated from Australia.

They looked at insomnia patients and they put their hands or their feet in warm water.

And by doing that, it's a manipulation.

You can see how quickly their hands and their feet, what we call vasodilate, fill with blood.

Healthy people vasodilated very quickly in response to that warm water, meaning that their hands and their feet sort of had this red, or at least for my feet, they would be this red tone to them.

However, in the insomnia patients, they did not vasodilate anywhere near as well.

So once again, it suggests that when you have problems with sleep, part of the equation may be that you have impaired thermoregulatory ability.

And we do see this in insomnia patients.