Wearable Monitors Confirm Impact of Sleep Patterns on Chronic Disease
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, deep sleep, and sleep irregularity were significantly associated with increased risk for a range of chronic diseases, based on a new study of > 6000 individuals.
"Most of what we think we know about sleep patterns in adults comes from either self-report surveys, which are widely used but have all sorts of problems with over- and under-estimating sleep duration and quality, or single-night sleep studies," said corresponding author Evan L. Brittain, MD, of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, in an interview.
The single-night study yields the highest quality data but is limited by extrapolating a single night's sleep to represent habitual sleep patterns, which is often not the case, he said. In the current study, published in Nature Medicine, "we had a unique opportunity to understand sleep using a large cohort of individuals using wearable devices that measure sleep duration, quality, and variability. The All of Us Research Program is the first to link wearables data to the electronic health record at scale and allowed us to study long-term, real-world sleep behavior," Brittain said.
The timing of the study is important because the American Heart Association now recognizes sleep as a key component of heart health, and public awareness of the value of sleep is increasing, he added.
The researchers reviewed objectively measured, longitudinal sleep data from 6785 adults who used commercial wearable devices (Fitbit) linked to electronic health record data in the All of Us Research Program. The median age of the participants was 50.2 years, 71% were women, and 84% self-identified as White individuals. The median period of sleep monitoring was 4.5 years.
REM sleep and deep sleep were inversely associated with the odds of incident heart rhythm and heart rate abnormalities. Each percent increase in REM sleep was associated with a reduced incidence of atrial fibrillation (odds ratio [OR], 0.86), atrial flutter (OR, 0.78), and sinoatrial node dysfunction/bradycardia (OR, 0.72). A higher percentage of deep sleep was associated with reduced odds of atrial fibrillation (OR, 0.87), major depressive disorder (OR, 0.93), and anxiety disorder (OR, 0.94).
Read the whole article here.
