National Institute for Health and Welfare, Department of Chronic Disease Prevention, Turku, Finland.
J Sleep Res. 2011 Jun;20(2):288-97. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2869.2010.00899.x. Epub 2010 Dec 6.
Short and long self-reported sleep durations have been found to be associated with several seemingly disparate health risks and impaired functional abilities, including cognitive functioning. The role of long sleep is especially poorly understood in this context. Psychomotor slowness, shown to have analogous associations with cognitive performance and health risks as self-reported long sleep duration, has not been studied together with sleep duration in epidemiological settings. We hypothesized that self-reported habitual sleep duration, especially long sleep, is associated with slow psychomotor reaction time, and that this association is independent of vigilance-related factors. The hypothesis was tested in a sample of 5352 individuals, representing the general adult population. We found a U-shaped association between self-reported sleep duration and psychomotor speed, which prevailed even after controlling for several pertinent confounders. This novel finding can be interpreted to mean that self-reported sleep duration, at least in the case of long sleep, is an indicator of bodily/brain integrity and, taken together with the results of cognitive epidemiology, may provide some new insights into the mechanisms underlying the associations between habitual self-reported sleep duration, health risks and impaired functional abilities.
短时间和长时间的自我报告睡眠时间与多种看似不同的健康风险和功能障碍有关，包括认知功能。在这种情况下，长睡眠时间的作用尤其难以理解。已经表明，精神运动迟缓与认知表现和健康风险具有类似的关联，就像自我报告的长睡眠时间一样，但它尚未在流行病学环境中与睡眠持续时间一起进行研究。我们假设自我报告的习惯性睡眠持续时间，尤其是长睡眠时间，与精神运动反应时间缓慢有关，并且这种关联独立于与警觉性相关的因素。该假设在代表一般成年人群的 5352 名个体样本中进行了检验。我们发现自我报告的睡眠时间与精神运动速度之间呈 U 形关联，即使在控制了几个相关混杂因素后，这种关联仍然存在。这一新颖的发现可以解释为，自我报告的睡眠持续时间，至少在长睡眠时间的情况下，是身体/大脑完整性的指标，并且结合认知流行病学的结果，可能为习惯性自我报告的睡眠持续时间、健康风险和功能障碍之间的关联的机制提供一些新的见解。
