Both night-time sleep and nap behaviour have been linked consistently to health outcomes. Although reasons for napping are usually tied to night-time sleep, the majority of studies assess their effects independently. The current study thus aimed to examine the health relevance of patterns of sleep behaviour that take into account both night-time and daytime sleep habits. Night-time sleep, recorded during 7 days via actigraphy from 313 participants (aged 34-82 years) of the Midlife in the United States II Biomarker study, was assessed. Blood and urine specimens were assayed for noradrenaline, interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein. Participants self-reported nap behaviour, depressive symptoms, perceived chronic stress and the presence of medical symptoms and conditions. Overall, nappers (n = 208) showed elevated waist-hip ratios, C-reactive protein and interleukin-6 levels compared to non-nappers and reported more physiological symptoms and conditions (all P ≤ 0.019). Within nappers, cluster analysis revealed three patterns of sleep behaviour-infrequent nappers with good night-time sleep, frequent nappers with good night-time sleep and nappers with poor night-time sleep. Nappers with poor night-time sleep thereby exhibited elevated noradrenaline levels, depressive symptoms and perceived stress scores compared to other groups (all P ≤ 0.041). These findings support the idea that nap-health relationships are complex, in that frequency of napping and accumulation of nap sleep is not related linearly to health consequences. Assessing nap behaviour in conjunction with night-time sleep behaviour appeared crucial to elucidate further the health relevance of napping, particularly in terms of psychological health outcomes, including chronic stress and depressive symptoms.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 14. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 11 August 2021.
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#2,477,162
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Outputs from Journal of Sleep Research
#425
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#41,490
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Outputs of similar age from Journal of Sleep Research
#7
of 32 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 24,942,536 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,976 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 25.3. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 32 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 81% of its contemporaries.
