Sleep Deprivation Influenced by Race, Ethnicity and Nationality

In two studies of sleep that was included at the representation at SLEEP 2012, sleep differences among American’s based on race and ethnic background were reported.

The first study was conducted by the State University of New York (SUNY) and included 400,000 participants from the National Health Interview Survey Between 2004 to 2010. The study revealed that Americans who were naturally born in the United States tend to sleep longer than the recommended seven to nine hours amount of sleep each night. Meanwhile, those Americans who were born in Africa tend to sleep less than six hours while Indian born Americans tend to sleep an six to eight hours each night.

According to the study’s lead author, Abhishek Pandey, MD, they believe that social desirability might be playing a significant role in the self-reported data. Pandey further said that inadequate sleep might be more rampant in the population than the actual self-report data, but maybe over or under-reported to project a better image of a person’s observed sleep health.

On the other hand, sleep researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago observed the sleep measurements of 439 randomly selected men and women from Chicago and includes surveys regarding sleep quality and sleepiness during daytime. The study shows that white participants sleep a lot higher than the other groups while blacks have the poorest quality of sleep. The study also found out that Asian had the highest reports of sleepiness at daytime.

According to the study’s lead author and principal, Mercedes Carnethon, PhD, such racial and ethnic differences in sleep continued even following statistical adjustment for heart diseases risk factors that they have long known to be associated with poor sleep like body mass index, diabetes and high blood pressure.  Carnethon added that they have excluded participants who had history of mild to moderate sleep apnea. Therefore, the said differences in sleep are not attributable to basic sleep disorders but represent the sleep experience of a healthy subgroup of the population.

Pandey’s study also revealed that foreign-born Americans were less possibly to report short or long sleep than U.S.-born Americans following adjustments for effects of age, sex, education, income, smoking, alcohol-intake and body’s weight and emotional distress.

Researchers concluded that habitually sleeping longer or shorter than the recommended seven to nine hours for adults can be linked to several higher risks like cardiovascular disease, stroke and accidents and mental and emotional disorders. 

The study’s goals were in relation with the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) Workshop on Reducing Health Disparities: The Role of Sleep Deficiency and Sleep Disorders. Its main goal is to better understand inadequate sleep, particularly across population subsets as well as to shed hope on acculturation and miscegenation.

Sleep deprivation is very common among Americans. Therefore, many of them rely on natural sleep remedies and other sleep aids.