Not enough shut-eye makes co-eds feel unhealthy

By Anne Harding

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Young people who average less than seven hours of sleep nightly consider themselves to be in worse health than those who sleep more, a survey of 17,465 university students in 24 countries has found.

While it's unclear from this survey whether poor health causes short sleep or vice versa, "we think that it's unlikely in this group that the poor health is actually contributing to the shorter sleep," Dr. Andrew Steptoe of University College London in the UK told Reuters Health. Young adults are generally in excellent health, he and his colleagues note in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"It's a major complaint of all parents of teenagers that they sleep too long," Steptoe noted. "It could be that there is some sort of biological basis for this." Young people may need more of sleep's restorative effects than older people do, he suggests.

Steptoe and colleagues think parents should not feel compelled to cut young people's sleep short, but should let them get the rest they need.

Of all the students in the survey, men and women in Japan, Taiwan, Korea and Thailand rated their health the worst, and slept the least -- between six and seven hours, on average.

For example, in Japan, 38 percent of men and 46 percent of women rated their health as fair to poor, as did 36 percent of Korean men and 43 percent of Korean women. But just 10 percent of all male study participants and 14 percent of females considered their health to be fair or poor.

"The sleep pattern is something that many people recognize when they go to those countries in the Pacific Rim," Steptoe noted, pointing out that it's common to see people snoozing on the trains or subways at any time of the day. The short sleep and poor self-rated health could be consequences of the heavy pressure to achieve placed on young people in these countries, he added.

At the other end of the scale, Romanian and Spanish men and Belgian and Bulgarian women slept the most, averaging about eight hours a night.

SOURCE: Archives of Internal Medicine, September 18, 2006.