One Third of American Adults Not Getting Sufficient Sleep
More than a third of adults in the United States don’t get the recommended 7 hours of sleep each night, according to a new study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Poor sleep habits are associated with increased health risks, decreased job performance, and more. Adults are recommended to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night, but no previous studies have examined the prevalence of sleep duration across the United States.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
RELATED CONTENT
Could Extra Sleep Improve Memory in Alzheimer’s Disease?
Study: Less Sleep Associated with Distracted Eating, Obesity
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
To conduct the study, researchers from the CDC collected data from the 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), which included survey responses from 444,306 adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
After analyzing the data, they found that 35% of adults reported sleeping less than 7 hours each night.
Adults aged 65 years and older reported sleeping the longest amount of time (74%), and adults aged 25 to 44 years reported sleeping the shortest (62%).
White individuals were most likely to get sufficient sleep (67%), and black individuals and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders were least likely (54%).
Adults in the southeastern US and in states along the Appalachian Mountains—regions that contain high obesity rates and other health issues—reported shorter sleep duration than other regions.
“The determination that more than a third of US adults report sleeping <7 hours and findings of geographic and sociodemographic variations in low prevalence of healthy sleep duration suggest opportunities for promoting sleep health,” researchers concluded.
—Amanda Balbi
Reference:
Liu Y, Wheaton AG, Chapman DP, et al. Prevalence of healthy sleep duration among adults — United States, 2014. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep. 2016;65(6):137–141. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6506a1.