TY - JOUR

T1 - Gender differences in nighttime sleep patterns and variability across the adult lifespan

T2 - A global-scale wearables study

AU - Jonasdottir, Sigga Svala

AU - Minor, Kelton

AU - Lehmann, Sune

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2020 Sleep Research Society. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Sleep Research Society. All rights reserved.

PY - 2021

Y1 - 2021

N2 - Study Objectives: Previous research on sleep patterns across the lifespan have largely been limited to self-report measures and constrained to certain geographic regions. Using a global sleep dataset of in situ observations from wearable activity trackers, we examine how sleep duration, timing, misalignment, and variability develop with age and vary by gender and BMI for nonshift workers. Methods: We analyze 11.14 million nights from 69,650 adult nonshift workers aged 19-67 from 47 countries. We use mixed effects models to examine age-related trends in naturalistic sleep patterns and assess gender and BMI differences in these trends while controlling for user and country-level variation. Results: Our results confirm that sleep duration decreases, the prevalence of nighttime awakenings increases, while sleep onset and offset advance to become earlier with age. Although men tend to sleep less than women across the lifespan, nighttime awakenings are more prevalent for women, with the greatest disparity found from early to middle adulthood, a life stage associated with child-rearing. Sleep onset and duration variability are nearly fixed across the lifespan with higher values on weekends than weekdays. Sleep offset variability declines relatively rapidly through early adulthood until age 35-39, then plateaus on weekdays, but continues to decrease on weekends. The weekend-weekday contrast in sleep patterns changes as people age with small to negligible differences between genders. Conclusions: A massive dataset generated by pervasive consumer wearable devices confirms age-related changes in sleep and affirms that there are both persistent and life-stage dependent differences in sleep patterns between genders.

AB - Study Objectives: Previous research on sleep patterns across the lifespan have largely been limited to self-report measures and constrained to certain geographic regions. Using a global sleep dataset of in situ observations from wearable activity trackers, we examine how sleep duration, timing, misalignment, and variability develop with age and vary by gender and BMI for nonshift workers. Methods: We analyze 11.14 million nights from 69,650 adult nonshift workers aged 19-67 from 47 countries. We use mixed effects models to examine age-related trends in naturalistic sleep patterns and assess gender and BMI differences in these trends while controlling for user and country-level variation. Results: Our results confirm that sleep duration decreases, the prevalence of nighttime awakenings increases, while sleep onset and offset advance to become earlier with age. Although men tend to sleep less than women across the lifespan, nighttime awakenings are more prevalent for women, with the greatest disparity found from early to middle adulthood, a life stage associated with child-rearing. Sleep onset and duration variability are nearly fixed across the lifespan with higher values on weekends than weekdays. Sleep offset variability declines relatively rapidly through early adulthood until age 35-39, then plateaus on weekdays, but continues to decrease on weekends. The weekend-weekday contrast in sleep patterns changes as people age with small to negligible differences between genders. Conclusions: A massive dataset generated by pervasive consumer wearable devices confirms age-related changes in sleep and affirms that there are both persistent and life-stage dependent differences in sleep patterns between genders.

KW - aging

KW - big data

KW - gender

KW - sleep

KW - sleep misalignment

KW - sleep timing and duration

KW - sleep variability

U2 - 10.1093/sleep/zsaa169

DO - 10.1093/sleep/zsaa169

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 32886772

AN - SCOPUS:85098715996

VL - 44

JO - Sleep (Online)

JF - Sleep (Online)

SN - 0161-8105

IS - 2

M1 - zsaa169

ER -