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Epidemiology and Population Health

Association between accelerometer-measured irregular sleep duration and longitudinal changes in body mass index in older adults

International Journal of Obesity volume 49, pages 1280–1289 (2025)Cite this article

Subjects

Abstract

Background

Irregular sleep duration may disrupt circadian rhythms and contribute to metabolic, behavioral, and mood changes, potentially increasing the risk for obesity. However, quantitative data on the relationship between sleep duration irregularity and weight change are lacking.

Methods

In this prospective study, we analyzed data from 10,572 participants (mean age: 63 years) in the UK Biobank who wore accelerometers for a week between 2013 and 2015 and had two body mass index (BMI; kg/m²) measurements on average 2.5 years apart. Irregular sleep duration was assessed by the within-person standard deviation (SD) of 7-night accelerometer-measured sleep duration.

Results

Participants with sleep duration SD > 60 min versus ≤30 min had 0.24 kg/m2 (95% CI: 0.08, 0.40) higher BMI change (kg/m2), standardized to three-year intervals, and 80% (95% CI: 1.28, 2.52) higher risk for incident obesity, after adjusting for sociodemographic factors, shift work, and baseline BMI or follow-up period (p-nonlinearity <0.02 for both). These associations remained consistent after adjusting for lifestyle, comorbidities, and other sleep factors, including sleep duration. Age, sex, baseline BMI, and genetic predisposition to higher BMI (measured with a polygenic risk score) did not appear to modify the association.

Conclusions

Since irregular sleep duration is common, trials of interventions targeting sleep irregularity might lead to new public health strategies that tackle obesity.

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Data availability

This study used data from the UK Biobank under approved Project ID: 85501. UK Biobank data are available upon application to registered researchers (https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk).

Code availability

The code used to generate the results is available upon request from the first author (SK).

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Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the participants and staff of the UK Biobank study for their invaluable contributions of data and support to this research. The authors also acknowledge the support of all funding sources that facilitated this study.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01HL155395) and the UKB project 85501. SK was supported by the American Heart Association Postdoctoral Fellowship (https://doi.org/10.58275/AHA.24POST1188091.pc.gr.190780). RN was supported by a grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO, Dutch National Research Agenda, Research along routes by consortia, 2021–2026, BioClock: the circadian clock in modern society). MKR was supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) (NIHR203308). This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH, National Institute on Aging (ZIAAG000530).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Sina Kianersi, Kaitlin S. Potts, Heming Wang, Tamar Sofer & Susan Redline

  2. Channing Division of Network Medicine, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Sina Kianersi

  3. Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA

    Tamar Sofer

  4. Department of Biostatistics, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA

    Tamar Sofer

  5. Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden, the Netherlands

    Raymond Noordam

  6. Health Campus the Hague/Public Health and Primary Care, Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden/The Hague, the Netherlands

    Raymond Noordam

  7. Division of Diabetes, Endocrinology and Gastroenterology, School of Medical Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Martin K. Rutter

  8. Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism Centre, Manchester Royal Infirmary, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, NIHR Manchester Biomedical Research Centre, Manchester Academic Health Science Centre, Manchester, UK

    Martin K. Rutter

  9. Laboratory of Epidemiology and Population Sciences, Intramural Research Program, National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Tianyi Huang

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Contributions

SK and TH contributed to the conception, investigation, data curation, methodology, and formal analysis of the project. SK prepared the original draft of the manuscript. SK, KSP, HW, TS, RN, MKR, SR, TH reviewed, revised, participated in data interpretation, and approved the final version of the manuscript. TH and SR supervised the work.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tianyi Huang.

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Competing interests

MKR reports receiving consultancy fees from Eli Lilly and has modest stock ownership in GSK, unrelated to this work. The other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

All methods were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations. National Health Service North-West Multi-Centre Research Ethics Committee approved the UK Biobank study, and all participants provided written informed consent at baseline.

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Kianersi, S., Potts, K.S., Wang, H. et al. Association between accelerometer-measured irregular sleep duration and longitudinal changes in body mass index in older adults. Int J Obes 49, 1280–1289 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41366-025-01768-8

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