ABSTRACT
Objectives
The objective of this study was to understand how sleep duration could affect depression among elderly in China.
Method
A total of 7103 individuals aged 60 and older were selected from China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. A generalized linear mixed-effects model was used to estimate the relationship between sleep duration and depression, and we performed stratified analyses by age: young-old elderly, old-old elderly and oldest-old elderly.
Results
Short sleep duration significantly incresased CES-D10 depression scores. In addition, the participants with middle sleep duration had higher CES-D10 scores compared to the participants with long sleep duration among young-old elderly, and we found that middle sleep duration was not significantly different from CES-D10 scores after adjustment for demographics, frequencies of activities and Chronic diseases.
Conclusions
These findings suggested that there was a complex association between depression and sleep duration among elderly in China. Different from previous research results on the middle or normal sleep time of the elderly, the middle sleep duration maybe not optimal sleep duration in this study. Investigation of sleep extension to prevent depression may be warranted among the elderly.
Acknowledgments
The data of the research used the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHRLS). The authors would like to thank all employees that offered their time to collect data for this study.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Limitations
Our study also has some limitations. Firstly, the measure of sleep duration and depression were self-reported lead to the analysis bias of the association between sleep duration and depression. Secondly, although we have adjusted for many covariates, there may be a number of factors affecting the results, such as heredity, environment, life events, and so on that we were not able to control for in our analysis of the data.