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Not getting enough sleep can lead a wide range of health problems.
Along with medical problems including lower resistance to disease, fatigue, and problems at work, getting too much or too little sleep has also been linked to obesity, cardiovascular problems, being more accident-prone, and hypertension. The amount of healthy sleep you get can also predict overall mortality rate. In one study, regularly sleeping fewer than four hours or more than ten hours a night was linked to a reduced lifespan in adults. Interestingly, too much sleep can have a negative impact on overall health much like getting too little sleep does.
And this link isn't just limited to how much sleep people get as adults. As part of his reseaarch into gifted children, psychologist Lewis Terman first proposed in 1913 that getting an optimum amount of sleep can play a strong role in physical and mental efficiency. A century of research into the effect of sleep on health suggests that getting around seven hours of sleep a night is essential for good health. On the other hand, poor sleep patterns have been consistently linked to school problems in children and employment problems in adults.
Research into how much sleep children get shows that, even when other factors such as childhood poverty and body mass index are taken into account, poor sleep in children can predict health problems later in life. As one example, a New Zealand study following children with sleep problems found that poor sleep can predict obesity even decades later. Still, research looking at the long-term consequences of poor sleep in childhood remains limited so it is difficult to make strong conclusions about how sleep problems can lead to other types of health problems later in life.
To help explore the sleep-health link in greater detail, a new research study published in Health Psychology used information taken from the Terman Life Cycle Study to examine how poor sleep is linked to long-term mortality. First started by Lewis Terman in 1917, the study followed 1,528 children with high IQs for decades to chart the major milestones in their lives. Though Terman died in 1956, researchers have continued his research project to the present day. The 856 males and 672 females participants in the long-term project were asked to complete surveys on health and lifestyle factors every five to ten years until their deaths. Though the study participants were not really representative of the total U.S. population (being primarily middle-class residents of California), Terman's project has provided important conclusions about the effect of various psychosocial factors on overall mortality.
Among the different health factors examined in the study was the amount of sleep each child typically got each night. As the amount of sleep a child needs will vary according to age , the number of hours of sleep reported for each child was adjusted by birthdate. Other factors, including mood, cheerfulness, level of energy, and how their parents rated the child's overall health were included as well. Since children who died prior to 1940 (often due to accident or serious illness) were dropped from the study, the researchers were able to see how these different factors affected long-term survival.
Along with the information collected in the Terman project, the new study conducted by lead researcher Margaret Duggan of the University of California, Riverside and her colleagues, gathered information on cause of death for each partiicpant (including death certificate). The purpose of the study was to track long-term survival and determine what health problems might be linked with sleep difficulties as a child.
What Duggan and her colleagues found wa that healthy male children or adolescents who showed abnormal sleep patterns (significantly more or less sleep than other males their age) had a much higher risk of dying prematurely throughout their life span. For females however, the link between sleep problems and later mortality was not as strong. Though researchers have reported similar findinsg in the past, none of the participants in the Terman Study had serious illnesses that might have influenced the results. The results also showed that males were at increased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and infection. While research has shown that poor sleep can lead to problems with inflammation and a suppressed immune system, there is not enough data in the current study to make any real conclusions about why poor sleep might cause poor health.
For reasons that are still not entirely clear, the link between sleep problems and reduced mortality seems much greater for males than for females. Since gender equality is a fairly recent development and females bellonging to the generation that participated in the Terman study were often more limited in career opportunities, the study results may not be easily related to men and women of the present day in terms of handling poor sleep and disease. Duggan and her fellow researchers also note that the amount of sleep that children get today is much less than the amount of sleep that the children in the Terman study typically reported decades earlier. For that reason, more research is definitely needed to understand the link between sleep in childhood and long-term mortality.
So what lessons can we draw from this research study? First of all, these results strongly suggest that childhood sleep problem can be linked to later health problems, especially in males. Though previous researchers have pointed out similar findings, this is the first study to look at the impact of childhood sleep problems on mortality over a period of six decades or more. Child health specialists have long been warning that children today aren't getting enough sleep. As we can see from this study, the medical consequences of poor sleep habits in children and adolescents seem to have far-reaching consenquences on life expectancy and the likelihood of developing serious illness.
So keep an eye on how well your children sleep. Their lives may depend on it.
