Dr. Matt Walker

What they found was that in those older adults, when they were not manipulated with this thermal temperature, in the second half of the night, there was a 50% probability that they were going to be awake for some part of the second half of the night.

When they did the thermal manipulation, they dropped that number down to 5%.

So they reduced a 50% probability of waking up down to 5% in older adults.

And again, they improved the quality of their deep sleep.

Think about, by the way, why that was so effective for older adults.

I guarantee you, you've probably seen, you've been in a warm climate or you've been down on the beach, you know, here sort of in Los Angeles.

And people are out in shorts and T-shirts or crop tops.

And then occasionally there will be someone, and I love seeing these sites where, you know, a child is sort of wheeling along their elderly parents, a beautiful sort of scene of caring.

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.