Healthy sleep pattern may reduce global burden of mental disorders
Healthy sleep behaviors may reduce the impact of genetic predisposition and lifestyle factors on the risk for mental disorders, according to results of a cohort study published in Psychiatry Research.
“Many previous studies focused on one or two sleep behaviors, ignoring the possible interaction among different sleep behaviors,” Chuyu Pan, of the School of Public Health at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, and colleagues wrote. “Although relationship between sleep quality index consisting of several sleep behaviors and [mental disorders] has been explored, no cohort studies have examined a combination of the duration, chronotype preference, insomnia symptom, snoring and daytime dozing and its associations with the risk of [mental disorders]. Therefore, it is significant to investigate association between the combination of these sleep behaviors and [mental disorders].”
Pan and colleagues examined data from 402,290 participants from the U.K. Biobank who did not have baseline mental disorders. Participants were grouped into poor, intermediate and health sleep patterns based on their sleep score, calculated using data collected from five sleep behaviors. Researchers used a Cox proportional hazard model to estimate associations between sleep behaviors and mental disorders. They further estimated associations by accounting for lifestyle factors, such as physical activity, coffee intake, tea intake and genetic susceptibility.
Results showed an association between healthy sleep pattern and lower risk for overall mental disorder status (HR = 0.41; 95% CI, 0.39-0.43), depressive disorders (HR = 0.34; 95% CI, 0.31-0.37) and anxiety disorders (HR = 0.46; 95% CI, 0.41-0.79) compared with poor sleep pattern. In each subgroup of physical activity, tea intake, coffee intake, age and genetic risk scores, healthy sleep pattern appeared to partly reduce the risk for diseases.
“Our findings suggest that encouraging healthy sleep pattern might be a great contributor to reducing the global burden of [mental disorders],” Pan and colleagues wrote.