Leveraging The National Sleep Research Resource to Enhance Understanding of Sleep Health Across Populations
2022 Focused Projects Grant for Junior Investigators
Joon Chung, PhD
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Key Project Outcomes
Key project outcome 1: We found that objectively irregular sleep tends to co-occur with objectively less duration of sleep, and conversely that those who tended to obtain regular sleep also tended to obtain optimal sleep duration. We operationalized sleep metric co-occurrence patterns by cluster analysis, which in our data, identified two sub-groups: an irregular-insufficient sub-group who obtained less sleep with greater irregularity, and a ‘regular-optimal’ group which tended to obtain optimal amounts of sleep with high regularity. This metric of sleep regularity – of sleep health – was largely independent of sleep disorders.
Key project outcome 2: We analyzed the composite contrast of regular sleep schedules vs irregular sleep schedules: who lived longer? The ‘regular-optimal’ group had ~40% lower mortality hazard compared to the ‘irregular-insufficient’ group. Thus, if ‘sleep’ were an 8-hour pill, it would be beneficial to take the full dose of sleep, at regular times, consistently, as there is evidence that doing so is associated with more favorable health and, potentially, greater longevity.