Better sleep linked to lower mortality

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Higher sleep scores were associated with lower mortality hazard, according to a study presented at the SLEEP 2022 meeting.

Joon Chung, PhD, a research fellow in the division of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, shared results on multidimensional sleep health from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), an ethnically diverse prospective cohort study.

Previous research on this topic has generally focused on individual factors such as sleep insufficiency, according to the study, but sleep health consists of multiple interrelated dimensions.

The MESA study began with 6,814 adults free of cardiovascular disease. Of those, 4,077 participated in MESA-Sleep 10 years later. Out of 2,021 eligible participants, the final sample was comprised of 1,726 individuals, Chung said.

“Sleep health is a multidimensional pattern of sleep wakefulness adapted to the individual, social and environmental factors,” Chung said in the presentation.

Thirteen sleep attributes were evaluated for their effect on sleep health and association with mortality, according to the study.

“As is the case with nutrition, we expect some sleep metrics to matter more than others,” he said. “The top is total sleep time, with the next, timing irregularity, then duration irregularity, then apnea. We found a 25% reduced mortality hazard with a 1-SD decrease in sleep scores.”

The researchers concluded that higher sleep scores imply better sleep across multiple metrics and lower mortality hazard, Chung said. However, the results were not restricted to sleep duration or obstructive sleep apnea.

“These results speak to target multiple sleep characteristics for intervention,” he said. “Any one is not relevant on its own.”