Sleep and Circadian Rhythms in Chronic Disease and Lifecourse Epidemiology

Circadian rhythms are endogenous near-24 hour cycles that regulate most biological processes. When cycles are misaligned to the external world, this can cause sleep disorders and associated ill health. Deterioration in sleep quality is a prominent feature of ageing and poor sleep is characteristic of many chronic diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurodegeneration and some cancers. Growing evidence suggests that sleep and circadian rhythm disruption (SCRD) is not only a consequence of ageing, but can impact ageing processes and cause age-related disease.The health burden of sleep disorders and population ageing underscore the need for further research. If SCRD is causally linked to age-related disease, improving sleep across the lifespan could reduce chronic disease burden. Further, developing robust and easy-to-measure biomarkers of circadian disruption is pivotal for assessing circadian function and predicting health risks in clinical settings, and could enhance timing-based therapies.I will bring together the fields of integrative epidemiology and sleep/circadian science to explore how sleep patterns and circadian rhythms change as we age, and to understand their roles in the ageing process. I will address the knowledge gap in how biological and social factors influence sleep across the lifespan, and investigate the potential of blood-based biomarkers to capture circadian dynamics. Now is the optimal time to embark on these efforts, exploiting rapidly growing collections of detailed sleep measures in longitudinal studies and biobanks with time-stamped biological samples and disease outcomes. This provides an unprecedented opportunity to scale-up sleep and circadian science. The research will advance the state-of-the-art using advanced causal inference and deep learning methods, and harnessing genetic and molecular data, to uncover novel insights into the links between SCRD and age-related disease with huge clinical and public health benefit.