Longitudinal Association Between Sleep Duration and Depressive Symptoms in Chinese Elderly

Rize Jing; Tingting Xu; Hongguo Rong; Xiaozhen Lai; Hai Fang

doi:10.2147/NSS.S269992

Longitudinal Association Between Sleep Duration and Depressive Symptoms in Chinese Elderly

Nat Sci Sleep. 2020 Oct 13:12:737-747. doi: 10.2147/NSS.S269992. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Rize Jing^{1

2}, Tingting Xu^{1

3}, Hongguo Rong², Xiaozhen Lai¹, Hai Fang^{2

4

5}

Affiliations

¹ School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing 100083, People's Republic of China.
² China Center for Health Development Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100083, People's Republic of China.
³ Department of Social and Behavioral Science, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA.
⁴ Peking University Health Science Center- Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention Joint Center for Vaccine Economics, Peking University, Beijing 100083, People's Republic of China.
⁵ Key Laboratory of Reproductive Health, National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China, Peking University, Beijing 10083, People's Republic of China.

Abstract

Aim: This study aimed to evaluate the longitudinal association between sleep duration and depressive symptoms among the elderly in China.

Methods: A data set from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) in 2011, 2013 and 2015 was adopted with a total of 22,847 respondents aged ≥60-years-old. A linear regression analysis with generalized estimating equations was employed to examine the longitudinal associations between duration of total sleep, nighttime sleep and daytime nap, and depressive symptoms.

Results: An extra hour of total sleep including nighttime sleep and daytime nap was associated with lower incidence of depressive symptoms among the elderly after adjusting all confounders (OR=0.83, 95% CI: 0.82-0.84). In addition, an extra hour of nighttime sleep (OR=0.82, 95% CI: 0.80-0.83) or daytime nap (OR=0.93, 95% CI: 0.89-0.97) was also negatively associated with depressive symptoms among the elderly. After controlling the total sleep time, an extra hour of nighttime sleep was negatively associated with depressive symptoms (OR=0.88, 95% CI: 0.84 to 0.92), while an extra hour of daytime nap displayed a positive association with depressive symptoms (OR=0.88, 95% CI: 0.84 to 0.92). Compared with the moderate nappers, only extended nappers had significantly higher incidence of depressive symptoms (OR=1.32, 95% CI: 1.19 to 1.45).

Conclusion: For the elderly in China, increasing their total sleep, nighttime sleep, and/or daytime nap duration would reduce the incidence of depressive symptoms. Moreover, after fixing the total sleep time, increasing nighttime sleep was more beneficial to the decrease of the incidence of depressive symptoms than daytime nap.

Keywords: China; daytime nap; depressive symptoms; sleep duration; the elderly.

Grants and funding

This study was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (71774006) and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2019M650392). The funders had no role in the design, analysis, or writing of the manuscript.