Community-based causal evidence that high habitual caffeine consumption alters distinct polysomnography-derived sleep variables.

Abstract

Background: Controlled laboratory studies demonstrate that caffeine acutely impairs sleep quality. However, the impact of daily caffeine intake, which is common in society, on community-derived physiological sleep measures is unknown.

Aims: Because good quality sleep is important for general health and well-being, we explored causal effects of habitual caffeine consumption on objective and subjective sleep variables collected at home.

Methods: We used dedicated, two-sample Mendelian Randomization (MR) and causal matching methods, including MR-Egger, inverse variance weighting, and weighted median, to analyze large community-based datasets taken from the UK Biobank (n = 485,511) and the HypnoLaus (n = 1702) cohorts.

Results: While self-rated sleep quality and morningness-eveningness did not differ, all statistical models revealed that four or more caffeinated beverages per day shorten total sleep time when compared to fewer caffeine containing drinks per day. The estimated reductions in sleep length varied from 11 to 229 minutes. Intriguingly, consistent with the homeostatic facet of sleep-wake regulation, the shorter sleep in high habitual caffeine consumers was characterized by increased non-rapid-eye movement sleep depth as measured by all-night electrical brain activity.

Conclusions: The data show that high habitual caffeine intake alters the characteristics of sleep in the general population, while sparing the major physiological principles of sleep-wake regulation possibly due to adaptation.