New Studies Document Sleep Deprivation Harms Everyday Health MenuNewslettersSearch Sleep News New Research on How Sleep Deprivation Harms Nurses College Students and Disaster SurvivorsThe data add to a growing body of evidence that shows not sleeping is hurting us in lots of ways. By Katherine LeeMedically Reviewed by Samuel Mackenzie, MD, PhDAugust 7, 2019Everyday Health ArchiveMedically ReviewedNew data from a single academic medical center finds that nearly half the nurses there reported being regularly sleep-deprived.Dean Mitchell/Getty ImagesA lot of people struggle when it comes to regularly clocking enough sleep. More than a third of adults in the United States do not get the seven or more hours of sleep per night recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), according to a 2015 AASM report. Health professionals and public health advocates including AASM and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) jointly declared chronic insufficient sleep a health epidemic back in 2013. That latter step isn’t surprising, because not getting enough sleep regularly has been linked to a host of health problems, like problems with thinking, memory, concentration, and mood in the short run, and problems like obesity, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, and some types of cancer in the long run. RELATED: The Relationship Between Sleep Deprivation and Diabetes Pervasive sleep deprivation is not a problem with a one-size-fits-all solution. Fixes will need to be tailored for the different groups of people who struggle with sleep, which means those groups’ needs and sleep struggles will need to be better understood. Three new studies shed some light on three such populations: nurses, college students, and survivors of natural disasters. The studies were presented earlier this year at Sleep 2019, the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, which includes both the AASM and the Sleep Research Society. “These three studies underscore and reinforce other work that sleep deprivation is a widespread problem across different communities and populations,” says James Rowley, MD, a professor of medicine at Wayne State University in Detroit and an AASM board member. “While sleep deprivation may manifest in different ways in different populations, it is clearly a health problem that needs to be addressed at both the local and societal levels and by both physicians and public health specialists.” Nearly Half of Nurses at This Large Academic Medical Center Struggle With Sleep Survey data from 1,165 nurses working at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City revealed that nearly half are getting insufficient sleep, and large numbers of nurses reported problems that are potentially indicative of insomnia and circadian rhythm disorders. The data were published in a study abstract in the April 2019 issue of the journal Sleep and were presented at the Sleep 2019 annual meeting. RELATED: Everything You Need to Know About Your Circadian Rhythm and How It Affects Your Sleep The findings concur with existing research that suggests sleep problems are higher than average in nurse populations. A March 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report showed that in a sample of 2,484 nurses and home health aides from across the United States, approximately 43 percent were getting fewer than seven hours of sleep per day. Other research has found fatigue and daytime sleepiness are higher than average in nurses, and particularly in nurses who work nights or 12- or 24-hour shifts. The new data is also noteworthy in light of the growing literature showing that sleep deprivation among nurses is a public health risk because it increases accident risk, explains the study’s author, Francis Christian, MD, a third-year fellow in pulmonary and critical care at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City. (A study published in May 2016 in the BMJ found that medical errors account for more than 250,000 deaths a year in the United States, making them the third leading cause of death.) The new study results are also interesting because they included many nurses from a single medical center and used several validated measures of sleep disturbance, says Dr. Rowley. (Rowley was not involved in any of the three new studies mentioned in this article.) The survey questions, which asked about participants’ past three months of sleep, were designed to assess the nurses for sleep disorder symptoms and measure who was not getting sufficient sleep. The survey found:Nearly half — 49 percent — of the nurses reported sleeping an average of less than seven hours a night.31 percent of the respondents had symptoms consistent with chronic insomnia.27 percent rely on medications to go to sleep.31 percent of the nurses reported symptoms indicative of shift work disorder, a common circadian rhythm sleep-wake disorder among people whose work schedules are outside the typical 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday, characterized by difficulty sleeping and excessive sleepiness, as defined by Cleveland Clinic. RELATED: Study Reveals Why All-Nighters May Be So Dangerous for Your Health Nurses are more likely to develop sleep problems than others, and there is a need for workplace interventions to improve their sleep health and well-being, Dr. Christian says. That’s the takeaway from this research: We need to better recognize and diagnose sleep problems in nurses. “We screen truckers for sleep apnea, but we don’t do that yet for healthcare professionals,” Christian says. Students Lack of Sleep Linked to Mental Health Symptoms Another study abstract published in the April 2019 issue of the journal Sleep and presented at the meeting analyzed sleep deprivation in college students, finding lower rates of self-reported sleep and fatigue were linked to higher risk of self-reported mental health symptoms, such as feeling hopeless or sad. Researchers looked at data from the National College Health Assessment, an annual survey of college students from across the United States. Their data included 110,496 college students. The data showed that among the overall group of college students, each night of insufficient sleep increased an individual’s likelihood of reporting the following mental health symptoms by these amounts:Increased a student’s likelihood of reporting feeling exhausted by 29 percentIncreased a student’s likelihood of reporting hopelessness by 24 percentIncreased a student’s likelihood of reporting thinking about suicide by 28 percent While previous research has linked mental health to sufficient sleep, the new data is significant because it looks at a very large population of college students from across the United States, Rowley says. RELATED: The Relationship Between Insomnia, Anxiety, Depression, and Other Mental Health Problems Is Complicated Rowley points out the study can only show an association between insufficient sleep and mental health symptoms. “It is unclear if the insufficient sleep is causing these symptoms, or does the presence of mental health problems lead to insufficient sleep,” he says. But the bottom line remains that this strong association between lack of sleep and mental health problems suggests attention to getting adequate sleep is important for college students, particularly considering the data show many college students struggle to get the sleep they need. The latest National College Health Assessment report, published in fall 2018, shows 44.4 percent of students said they felt “tired, dragged out, or sleepy during the day” for three to five days in a week. Sleep Problems Are Linked to Mental Health Problems in Natural Disaster Survivors Finally, another study reported on sleep deprivation in survivors of natural disasters. The study abstract, also published in the April 2019 issue of the journal Sleep and presented at the meeting in June, reported that insomnia, peritraumatic distress (emotional and physiological reactions experienced during and right after a traumatic event that can be predictive of post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and other psychological difficulties, per a 2018 paper on the topic in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders), PTSD, and depression symptoms were high among survivors of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti two years after the disaster. That natural disaster killed more than 200,000 people and displaced more than 1 million residents. The researchers surveyed 165 adult survivors living in Port-au-Prince two years after the disaster. Forty-two percent were found to have clinically significant levels of PTSD; 22 percent had symptoms of depression; and 94 percent reported experiencing insomnia after the earthquake. The researchers found that the strongest risk factors for sleep disturbances were peritraumatic distress and depression symptoms. This research is limited in that it was a small study and it included only survivors of one natural disaster, says the lead study author, Judite Blanc, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Healthful Behavior Change within the division of health and behavior in the department of population health at New York University School of Medicine in New York City. But the data suggest that sleep disruption, even two years after the earthquake, was still very prevalent among survivors. The important takeaway is that aid workers helping natural disaster survivors cope with the psychological effects of trauma should be considering sleep, too, Dr. Blanc says. The role sleep plays when it comes to our physical, mental, and emotional health has become more recognized in the United States in recent years, but that’s not the case everywhere in the world, Blanc explains. This research shows that attention to sleep health should be a part of aid and intervention after humanitarian crises, Blanc says. “Global health leaders should be aware of the importance of focusing on sleep health, not just mental health.” NEWSLETTERS Sign up for our Healthy Living Newsletter SubscribeBy subscribing you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. 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