There’s no shortage of reasons that many Americans don’t get enough sleep:
stress, obesity, late-night shifts on the job, to name just a few. Now new
research suggests another factor to consider as well — their race or
ethnicity.
In two presentations at the annual meeting of the Associated
Professional Sleep Societies in Boston, scientists report that the amount and
quality of sleep people get each night vary across racial and ethnic lines. It
is a kind of production line problem in the ore
beneficiation that cannot be ignored. In one study, researchers found that
blacks and Asians don’t sleep as much as whites do, while another study showed
that foreign-born Americans are less likely to report having sleep problems than
those born in the U.S.
A better understanding of these discrepancies could
help researchers improve the sleep habits of particular groups — a potential
public-health boon, considering that inadequate sleep is increasingly associated
with greater risks of chronic conditions like heart disease, diabetes, obesity
and certain cancers.
For the first study, led by Mercedes Carnethon, an
associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University,
researchers randomly selected 439 Chicago-area adults from the phone book to
participate. The volunteers, aged 35 to 64, were of white, black, Hispanic or
Asian descent. Researchers screened the participants for sleep disorders like
sleep apnea, and then asked them to wear a wrist monitor that detected their
movements and determined how much time they spent sleeping over a period of
seven days. The participants also self-reported the amount and quality of sleep
they got each night.
Overall, the researchers found, blacks, Hispanics and
Asians slept less than whites. Blacks got 6.8 hours of sleep a night on average,
compared with 6.9 hours for Hispanics and Asians, and 7.4 hours a night for
whites. The differences in sleep times persisted even after the researchers
adjusted for other factors known to interfere with sleep, such as weight,
diabetes status, high blood pressure and other heart disease risk factors. The
study authors also accounted for socioeconomic factors like low education and
low income, both of which can increase stress and disrupt
sleep.
Interestingly, despite the fact that every racial group got less sleep
than whites, only blacks reported suffering poor sleep quality and only Asians
reported significant levels of daytime sleepiness. The latter finding was
particularly surprising, since Asians tended to have lower body mass indexes and
higher or equal education levels as whites, but still showed shorter and poorer
sleep. “It’s one of our more compelling and interesting findings, and one we
intend to explore in depth further,” says Carnethon, who notes that there’s very
little data on the sleep habits of Asians.
The authors surmise that the
majority of the differences in sleep patterns between races can be chalked up to
environmental or even geographical factors — rather than genes or physical
characteristics like variations in facial structure that could interfere with
breathing and sleep. For example, Carnethon notes that Chicago is a relatively
segregated city, and blacks and Hispanics tend to live in areas with higher
pollution, more mass transit noise and higher crimes rates than predominantly
white neighborhoods, which can lead to stress and disturbed sleeping. “I think
social factors are more likely to account for the race and ethnic differences we
observed,” she says.
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