Social and Demographic Factors Related to Sleep Duration

TL;DRAbstract

Since an association between sleep duration and mortality was first described over 40 years ago,1 interest in sleep as a risk factor for adverse health has grown. Studies have generally confirmed the presence of a U-shaped association between sleep and mortality. In other words, individuals with both short and long sleep durations have a greater mortality risk than those with intermediate sleep durations. More recently, publications have begun reporting that sleep duration can also predict an ever growing number of diseases.2,3 At the same time, relatively little interest has been paid to determining what factors predict or influence an individual's sleep duration. This issue is of importance for a number of reasons. First, in order to demonstrate that the association between sleep duration and adverse health outcomes is causal in nature, it is necessary to ensure the observed associations are not confounded. By definition, a confounder must be a predictor of the exposure of interes

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