Do elderly people need more sleep?

Do elderly people need more sleep?

Chris Idzikowski (Director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre) gives expert video advice on: Why do some people need more sleep than others?; Do children or adults need more sleep?; Do elderly people need more sleep? and more...

Its hard to generalize, we used to say quite a lot that elderly people slept less than everybody else. And then it turns out that healthy elderly people could be good sleepers, and as good as they were in their thirties and forties. If somebody is particularly sleepy at any time then it implies that there is a sleep disorder going on somewhere that is causing problems with the sleep being recuperating and thus likely petering during the day. It is also hard to generalize at all. Elderly tend to accumulate more and more disorders and more and more ailments and more difficulties in actually staying asleep so they end up with less sleep but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't need it.