Study Ties Community Socioeconomic Deprivation to Reduced Sleep Duration

The level of socioeconomic depression in a neighborhood does influence the sleep duration of residents, a new study on adult twins revealed.

The study, led by Dr. Nathaniel Watson - the principal investigator at the University of Washington, Seattle, highlights that increased socioeconomic deprivation in a community was majorly associated with reduced sleep duration across all adult twins. Further analysis revealed that the link remained significant even after taking into consideration genetic and shared family environment.

"These results are a starting point for discussing the impact that neighborhood-level factors have on sleep duration," said principal investigator Dr. Watson, president-elect of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and professor of neurology at the University of Washington in Seattle. "If we improve upon social deprivation, we may have an opportunity to improve upon habits that influence how long people sleep."

In this study, the researchers evaluated a group of 2,202 twin pairs in which 1,268 were monozygotic pairs and 934 of them were of dizygotic pairs, and 62.1 percent were females. The participants, whose mean age was 37 years, were a part of the University of Washington Twin Registry. The mean self-reported nightly sleep duration of the participants was 7.4 hours.

The researchers measured the community socioeconomic deprivation using the Singh Index (SI), a composite, area-level measure. The SI index combines 17 indicators that measure factors such as poverty, income, education and housing.

The team also found an interesting gene by environment interaction. An increase in socioeconomic deprivation also increased the total genetic and non-shared environmental variability of sleep duration.

"The more socioeconomically deprived the neighborhood, the more erratic the sleep duration, both shorter and longer than the healthy seven to nine hours per night that we recommend," Watson said.

The finding will be documented in the journal Sleep and was presented in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at SLEEP 2014, the 28th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.