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Updated: Jul 15, 2025

Noninvasive, High-throughput Determination of Sleep Duration in Rodents
Published on: April 18, 2018
Genome-wide association studies and cross-population meta-analyses investigating short and long sleep duration
Isabelle Austin-Zimmerman1,2, Daniel F Levey3,4, Olga Giannakopoulou1,5
1Department of Mental Health Neuroscience, Division of Psychiatry, University College London, London, W1T 7BN, UK.
Abstract:
Sleep duration has been linked to a wide range of negative health outcomes and to reduced life expectancy. We present genome-wide association studies of short ( ≤ 5 h) and long ( ≥ 10 h) sleep duration in adults of European (N = 445,966), African (N = 27,785), East Asian (N = 3141), and admixed-American (N = 16,250) ancestry from UK Biobank and the Million Veteran Programme. In a cross-population meta-analysis, we identify 84 independent loci for short sleep and 1 for long sleep. We estimate SNP-based heritability for both sleep traits in each ancestry based on population derived linkage disequilibrium (LD) scores using cov-LDSC. We identify positive genetic correlation between short and long sleep traits (rg = 0.16 ± 0.04; p = 0.0002), as well as similar patterns of genetic correlation with other psychiatric and cardiometabolic phenotypes. Mendelian randomisation reveals a directional causal relationship between short sleep and depression, and a bidirectional causal relationship between long sleep and depression.
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