Sleep duration negatively impacts on self-rated health

Oct 14 2013

By Lucy Piper, Senior medwireNews Reporter

Individuals who experience long or short sleep durations are more likely to report poor self-rated health than healthy sleepers, Korean study findings suggest.

“These results add weight to recent data emphasizing the importance of adequate sleep in physical and mental health,” say the study researchers, led by Eun-Cheol Park (Yonsei University, Seoul).

They also note that the associations between long (≥9 hours/night) and short (≤5 hours/night) sleep durations and poor self-rated health were independent of sociodemographic, health risk behavior, and health status variables.

The researchers suggest in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine that both long and short sleep durations contribute to poor self-rated health by increasing fatigue.

And previous research has suggested that short and long sleep durations have adverse physiologic effects, such as impairing glucose tolerance and increasing inflammation and uric acid levels, and contribute to objective health outcomes.

Park and co-workers therefore believe that “poor self-rated health may be a mediator of the association among sleep durations, [cardiovascular disease], and mortality.”

However, their research cannot rule out the possibility that short and long sleep durations occur as a result of poor self-rated health, rather than being risk factors for it.

The cross-sectional study involved 15,252 participants in the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey IV, aged at least 19 years, 3705 of whom perceived their health to be insufficient, very insufficient, or bad.

Among the participants with poor self-rated health, 861 reported having a short sleep duration and 402 a long sleep duration.

The team calculated that short sleepers were a significant 1.4 times more likely to have poor self-rated health than individuals who reported sleeping an average of 7 hours a night, while long sleepers were a significant 1.3 times more likely.

These associations remained consistent in separate subgroups divided by gender, age, and body mass index.

Given the potential negative outcomes of inappropriate sleep duration, the team calls for further research to “examine how sleep duration interventions may influence multiple health and well-being outcomes.”

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