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. 2022 Dec 12;45(12):zsac239.
doi: 10.1093/sleep/zsac239.

Gut microbiome changes due to sleep disruption in older and younger individuals: a case for sarcopenia?

Jordi Morwani-Mangnani  1 , Panagiotis Giannos  2 , Clara Belzer  3 , Marian Beekman  1 , P Eline Slagboom  1 , Konstantinos Prokopidis  4
Affiliations

Gut microbiome changes due to sleep disruption in older and younger individuals: a case for sarcopenia?

Jordi Morwani-Mangnani et al. Sleep. .

Abstract

Major hallmarks of functional loss, loss of metabolic and musculoskeletal health and (multi)morbidity with aging are associated with sleep disturbances. With poor sleep shifts in gut microbial composition commonly manifest, which could mediate the pro-inflammatory state between sleep disturbances and sarcopenia. This systematic review presents the recent evidence on how sleep disturbances throughout the lifespan associate with and contribute to gut microbial composition changes, proposing a mechanism to understand the etiology of sarcopenia through sleep disturbances. The relationship between disturbed sleep and clinically relevant gut microbiota composition on health aspects of aging is discussed. A search was performed in PubMed, Cochrane Library, Scopus, Web of Science using keywords including (microbio* OR microflora) AND (sleep OR sleep disorder). Six cross-sectional population-based studies and five experimental clinical trials investigating healthy individuals with ages ranging from 4 to 71 were included. The cross-sectional studies reported similarities in associations with sleep disturbance and gut microbial diversity. In older adults, shorter sleep duration is associated with an increase in pro-inflammatory bacteria whereas increasing sleep quality is positively associated with an increase of beneficial Verrucomicrobia and Lentisphaerae phyla. In young adults, the effect of sleep disruption on gut microbiome composition, specifically the ratio of beneficial Firmicutes over Bacteroidetes phyla, remains contradictory and unclear. The findings of this review warrant further research in the modulation of the gut microbiome linking poor sleep with muscle-catabolic consequences throughout the lifespan.

Keywords: aging; bacterial diversity; gut microbiome; sarcopenia; sleep.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Flow diagram of the included searches of databases and registers.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Quality assessment of the three included NRCT studies according to the Cochrane ROBINS-I tool.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Quality assessment of the one included RCT studies according to the Cochrane RoB 2 tool.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Potential microbial changes in healthy individuals following sleep disturbance.
Figure 5.
Figure 5.
Proposed mechanism by which sleep disruption contributes to sarcopenia-related muscle dysfunction via the gut-muscle axis.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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