To investigate and explain sex differences in subjective and actigraphic sleep parameters in community-dwelling elderly persons. The study was embedded in the Rotterdam Study, a population-based study. Participants wore an actigraph and kept a sleep diary for an average of 6 consecutive nights. Subjective sleep quality was assessed with the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Unadjusted sex differences in sleep parameters were assessed with t tests. Women reported shorter total sleep time, a less favorable sleep-onset latency, lower sleep efficiency, and worse global sleep quality, as compared with men. When assessed with actigraphy, however, women were found to have longer and less-fragmented sleep than men.

Adults need 7 or more hours of sleep per night for the best health and wellbeing. The highest percentages were in the southeastern United States and in states along the Appalachian Mountains. The lowest percentages were in the Great Plains states. Therefore, we used BRFSS data to estimate short sleep duration prevalence at different geographic levels, including counties, congressional districts, and census tracts see Figures 2, 3 and 4 using a previously developed model.

To extend and validate a previously suggested model of the influence of uninterrupted sleep bouts on sleep onset misperception in a large independent data set. Polysomnograms and sleep diaries of insomnia patients and 92 controls were included. We modeled subjective sleep onset as the start of the first uninterrupted sleep fragment longer than L s minutes, where parameter L s reflects the minimum length of a sleep fragment required to be perceived as sleep.