Increased sleep fragmentation, when people briefly wake up several times at night without remembering it, is the “strongest predictor of mortality,” according to a review by scientists of 12 000 studies.

The research, published recently in the journal Digital Medicine, assessed thousands of studies investigating characteristics of individuals during their sleep, including chin and leg movement, breathing and heartbeat.

The team, including Emmanuel Mignot from Stanford University, developed a system using machine learning to predict a person’s “sleep age” and identify variations in sleep most closely linked to mortality, reports The Independent….more