Sleep quality and quantity in Italian University students: an actigraphic study

ABSTRACT

According to international recommendations, young adults should sleep at least 7 h per night and experience good sleep quality to avoid physical and mental health problems. University students are particularly exposed to the risk of sleep issues due to their tendency to go to bed late at night and other social and environmental factors. Here, we aimed to objectively characterize the weekly sleep habits using actigraphy (in terms of quantity, quality, and timing) in 82 Italian university students (mean age = 23.89, SD = 2.51 yrs, 44 women). Exploratory analyses were performed using linear mixed-effect regression to account for several factors (e.g., gender, circadian preferences, depressive symptomatology). We showed that participants spent in bed (TIB) about 7 h and 31 min during weekdays and 7 h and 46 min during the weekend, with 76.83% of the sample showing a TIB longer than 7 h. Women students spent more time in bed than men (~25 min) and went to bed earlier (~29 min). One-third of the sample showed a sleep efficiency <85%, whereas 70.73% of the sample showed a wake after sleep onset >40 min, with no differences between men and women. Depressive symptoms, alcohol and coffee consumption affected sleep onset latency, whereas circadian preference was strongly associated with bed and waketime. Moreover, most of the students did not take daytime naps to catch-up with sleep loss. Overall, our sample spent adequate time in bed, but they experienced a moderate low sleep quality, mainly due to high wake after sleep onset.

KEYWORDS:

• Actigraphy
• bedtime
• chronotype
• sleep loss
• waketime

Author contributions

N.C. and M.S. developed the study concept and contributed to the study design. Testing, data collection, and data analysis were performed by N.C, M.M, V.V, D.B and L.M. All authors interpreted the data, drafted the manuscript, provided critical revisions, and approved the final version for submission.

Declaration of interest statement

This is not an industry-supported study. None of the authors have potential conflicts of interest to be disclosed. All authors have seen and approved the manuscript.

Acknowledgements

“The present work was carried out within the scope of the research program “Dipartimenti di Eccellenza” from MIUR to the Department of General Psychology.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the University of Padova under the STARS Grants program to N.C;Supporting TAlent in ReSearch @ University of Padova - STARS Grants;