Lee E, Ramsey M, Malhotra A, et al. - Accelerated biological aging in bipolar disorder (BD) may correlate with the associated premature mortality and increased physical comorbidity and may include sleep disturbances and inflammation in adults with BD as the key mechanisms. In this study, researchers sought to rigorously examine these relationships. Fifty adults with BD and 73 age- and gender-comparable non-psychiatric comparison (NC) individuals, aged 26-65 years, were included as participants in this cross-sectional study. Relative to the NC group, BD participants had worse subjective sleep quality, as well as greater total sleep time (TST) intra-individual standard deviation (iSD) and wake time iSD. Higher TST iSD and lower mean percent sleep (PS) were noted to be linked with higher IL-6 levels in all participants. Higher CRP levels were noted in correlation with lower mean PS. Atypicality of the previous night’s TST was noted to be predictive of next day IL-6 levels. Both BD and NC groups showed the presence of all of these relationships. Overall, findings suggest a possible impact of sleep measures and their variability on inflammatory markers in all adults. Thus, there may be a correlation between sleep and the inflammatory processes that is believed to underlie accelerated aging in BD.