This study examined associations among socioeconomic status (SES), SES-related variables, and sleep in young middle school adolescents. Participants included 155 seventh-graders attending two urban New England middle schools. Aspects of the SES environment included parent demographic variables (e.g., income and education), neighborhood environment, and family home environment. Students complete...

TOPIC: Sleep Disorders TYPE: Late Breaking PURPOSE: Polysomnography is cumbersome and impractical for sleep assessment in centers that specialize weaning from prolonged mechanical ventilation. It unknown whether surrogate measures of – namely actigraphy, which monitors gross motor activity, or behavioral by a bedside nurse could serve as reliable surrogates the reference-standard polysomnograph...

Sleep quality decreases with aging and thus sleep complaints are prevalent in older adults, particularly for those with cognitive impairment and dementia. For older adults, emerging evidence suggests poor sleep quality increases risk of developing cognitive impairment and dementia. Given the aging population-and the impending economic burden associated with increasing numbers of dementia patien...

Paper sleep diaries are the gold standard for assessment of sleep continuity variables in clinical practice as well as research. Unfortunately, paper diaries can be filled out weekly instead of daily, lost, illegible or destroyed; and are considered out of date according to the newer technology savvy generations. In this study, we assessed the reliability and validity of using a wrist-worn elec...

Objectives Actigraphy is widely used to estimate sleep-wake time, despite limited information regarding the comparability of different devices and algorithms. We compared estimates of sleep-wake times determined by two wrist actigraphs (GT3X+ versus Actiwatch Spectrum [AWS]) to in-home polysomnography (PSG), using two algorithms (Sadeh and Cole-Kripke) for the GT3X+ recordings. Subjects and m...

We validated a Fitbit sleep tracking device against typical research-use actigraphy across four nights on 38 young adults. Fitbit devices overestimated sleep and were less sensitive to differences compared to the Actiwatch, but nevertheless captured 88 (poor sleepers) to 98 percent (good sleepers) of Actiwatch estimated sleep time changes. Bland-Altman analysis shows that the average difference...

TO THE EDITOR: In a recent issue of The American Journal of Physiology Gastrointestinal and Liver Physiology, Swanson et al. (3) recognized poor sleep of alcoholics and the inverse relationship between melatonin secretion and intestinal permeability or biomarker of endotoxemia in alcoholics. Namely, the decrease of plasma melatonin and its negative associated with lipopolysaccharide binding pro...