Sleep and Longevity

A peer‑reviewed study in SLEEP Advances led by OHSU’s Andrew McHill finds insufficient sleep is one of the strongest predictors of shorter U.S. life expectancy, second only to smoking, based on CDC survey data from 2019–2025 across 3,000+ counties. Defining sufficient sleep as at least seven hours, researchers mapped county‑level sleep patterns to life expectancy while controlling for smoking, diet, inactivity and loneliness, and cautioned the self‑reported data cannot prove causation.