Dose-response relationship between sleep duration and cardiovascular metabolic multimorbidity among older adults in China: A nationwide survey

Abstract

Aims and objectives: The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the duration of sleep per day and cardiovascular metabolic multimorbidity (CMM) in older adults and to identify how many hours of sleep per day can lead to a lower risk of CMM in older adults.

Background: CMM are a common syndrome in the older adults. There may be an association between sleep duration and CMM in older adults, with both insomnia and sleep deprivation having an impact on the health of older adults. Therefore, it is important to explore the possibility that older adults who sleep for a few hours per day may have a lower prevalence of CMM.

Methods: The study included 9710 older adults. The sleep duration in this study was assessed by the question "How many hours of sleep do you currently get in a day? ". Older adults were defined as having CMM when they had two or more of the five categories of hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, stroke or cardiovascular disease, dyslipidemia. We used multivariate logistic regression analysis to explore the association among sleep duration and CMM. Restrictive cubic splines were used to examine the shape of the association among sleep duration and the CMM. The STROBE checklist was used for this cross-sectional study.

Results: The mean age was 84.78 ± 11.73 years, with 55.5 % being female. Of the total sample, 21.3 % were CMM. When all covariates were adjusted, there was dose-response relationship between sleep duration and CMM. The dose-response relationship between CMM and sleep duration showed that older adults had a lower risk of cardiovascular and metabolic multimorbidity when they slept 9 h and 10 h per day.

Conclusion: With the increasing population of older adults, the number of older adults suffering from CMM continues to rise, and adequate sleep time can effectively prevent the occurrence of CMM. We should pay attention to the sleep problem of the older adults.

Relevance to clinical practice: This study provided information for healthcare providers to identify circumstances that increase cardiovascular metabolic multimorbidity and suggest the appropriate sleep duration per day to reduce the risk of disease in older adults.

Patient or public contribution: Because of the public database data used in this study, all data were collected by survey agency personnel, so this section is not applicable to this study.

Keywords: Multimorbidity; Old adults; Sleep duration.