Researchers followed 2,750 cognitively healthy older adults, average age 70, for an average of 5.6 years. The group with chronic insomnia, defined as trouble sleeping at least three nights a week for three months or more, had a 40 per cent higher risk of developing mild cognitive impairment or dementia than those without it. In raw terms, 14 per cent of the insomnia group developed one or the other, against 10 per cent of the rest.
The researchers put the gap at roughly the equivalent of three and a half additional years of ageing. A smaller subgroup had brain imaging, and those reporting less sleep than usual were more likely to show lower cognitive test scores, more white matter damage and more amyloid plaque. For amyloid specifically, the effect was comparable to what is seen in people carrying the APOE ε4 gene, a known genetic risk factor. Participants who had both insomnia and that gene declined faster still.
The findings were adjusted for age, high blood pressure, sleep apnoea and use of sleep medication. The authors are clear that this is an association rather than proof of cause, and the study used medical records to identify insomnia rather than a clinical assessment of everyone.
What makes this worth writing about in a business publication is the shape of the finding rather than the medicine.
The cost was incurred nightly, in small amounts, over years. The bill arrived decades later, in a different currency, as something that did not look like a sleep problem at all. Nobody experiencing a bad night in their forties is presented with an invoice. By the time the consequence becomes visible, the transaction that produced it is long out of memory.
Businesses accumulate exactly this kind of liability and almost never price it.
The deferred maintenance on the equipment is the obvious one. So is the training nobody had time for, the documentation nobody wrote, the supplier relationship held together by one person’s goodwill, and the customer complaint resolved by being charming rather than by fixing what caused it. None of these produce a cost in the month they occur. All of them produce a cost eventually, in a form that will be described as bad luck.
The reason these liabilities survive is that they are invisible on every statement a business actually looks at. A profit and loss account records what was spent. It has no line for what was not done. A business can look healthy for years precisely because it is converting future capacity into present margin, and the conversion rate is excellent right up to the point it is not.
The practical discipline is a short, unpleasant list, written once a year. What have we been deferring, for how long, and what does it turn into if we defer it another twelve months? Most of the entries will be mundane. One or two will be the thing that shows up in five years looking like a crisis.
Insomnia is unusually well suited to making this point because almost everyone treats it as a problem of the following morning.
The study suggests it was also a problem of the following decade.
This is a sensitive topic, and anyone struggling with persistent sleep problems is best served by speaking with a doctor. I can help find appropriate resources if that would be useful.
Source: Fox 8, “Insomnia is linked to higher risk of dementia and stroke, study finds”
