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The Association Between Body Mass Index (BMI) and Sleep Duration: Where Are We after nearly Two Decades of Epidemiological Research?

Garfield, V; (2019) The Association Between Body Mass Index (BMI) and Sleep Duration: Where Are We after nearly Two Decades of Epidemiological Research? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , 16 (22) p. 4327. 10.3390/ijerph16224327. Green open access

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Abstract

Over the past twenty years we have seen a vast number of epidemiological studies emerge on the topic of obesity and sleep duration, with a focus on body mass index, as it is easy and cheap to measure and analyse. Such studies largely observe that cross-sectionally a higher BMI is associated with shorter sleep and that in longitudinal studies shorter sleep duration is associated with increases in BMI over time, but some research has found no relationship between the two. This narrative review is not exhaustive, but appraises the literature on sleep duration and BMI from perspectives that have previously been unexplored in a single paper. As such, I discuss research in these important areas: bidirectionality, objective vs. subjective sleep duration, how meaningful the effect sizes are and how we have begun to address causality in this area. From the evidence appraised in this review, it is clear that: (i) there is some modest evidence of a bidirectional relationship between BMI and sleep duration in both children and adults; (ii) objective measurements of sleep should be used where possible; (iii) it remains difficult to confirm whether the effect sizes are conclusively meaningful in a clinical setting, but at least in adults this so far seems unlikely; (iv) to date, there is no solid evidence that this relationship (in either direction) is in fact causal. In the near future, I would like to see triangulation of these findings and perhaps a move towards focusing on distinct aspects of the relationship between obesity and sleep that have not previously been addressed in detail, for various reasons.

Type: Article
Title: The Association Between Body Mass Index (BMI) and Sleep Duration: Where Are We after nearly Two Decades of Epidemiological Research?
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph16224327
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16224327
Language: English
Additional information: © 2019 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords: sleep duration; body mass index; obesity; epidemiology; causality
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Cardiovascular Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Cardiovascular Science > Population Science and Experimental Medicine
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Cardiovascular Science > Population Science and Experimental Medicine > MRC Unit for Lifelong Hlth and Ageing
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10085473
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