March 14, 2025
On this #WorldSleepDay we are excited to share some of the ways that the Nurses’ Health Studies are well aligned with this year’s theme of “Make Sleep Health a Priority.”
How has your sleep been in the past 4 weeks? It turns out the answer to this question may provide clues to your future overall health. Sleep has been an active area of research in the cohorts for well over 10 years. We’ve asked participants questions to determine the duration and quality of sleep, which has provided extremely valuable information to help us determine the importance of sleep for broader physical and mental health. This has included recent work showing that healthy levels of sleep before and during the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the risk of long COVID in cohort participants.1 We’ve also shown that exposures in the neighborhoods around homes, including nighttime airplane noise, can have a negative impact on sleep duration.2
Obsessed with checking your sleep metrics on your wearable? We are too! We’ve been using technology to help us gather novel information on things like job stress, lifestyle, and environmental factors that may impact sleep duration and quality.3 These have included studies to determine if consumer wearables can provide accurate information on sleep and studies where we have sent Fitbits to many participants to assess sleep measures over time. We also have an active study exploring the relationships between sleep, metabolism and heart disease. If you are a participant, keep an eye out for invitations to join these innovative substudies; your participation makes all of this exciting work possible.
Need suggestions on how to improve sleep? The official page for World Sleep Day https://worldsleepday.org/ has lots of practical tips and resources.
For additional reading
1 Wang S, Huang T, Weisskopf MG, Kang JH, Chavarro JE, Roberts AL. Multidimensional sleep health prior to SARS-CoV-2 infection and risk of Post-COVID-19 condition. 2023. JAMA Network Open. 6(5): e2315885. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37252741/
2 Bozigar M, Huang T, Redline S, Hart JE, Grady ST, Nguyen DD, James P, Nicholas B, Levy JI, Laden F, Peters JL. Associations between aircraft noise exposures and self-reported sleep duration and quality in the US-based prospective Nurses’ Health Study cohort. 2023. Environmental Health Prospectives. 131(4): 47010. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37058435/
3 Hu CR, Wilt GE, Roscoe C, Iyer HS, Kessler WH, Laden F, Chavarro JE, Coull B, Redline S, James P, Hart JE. Associations of seasonally available global positioning systems-derived walkability and objectively measured sleep in the Nurses’ Health Study 3 Mobile Health Substudy. 2024. Environmental Epidemiology. 8(6): e348. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39399736/