Some service members sleep too little
Of active-duty military personnel seeking help for sleep complaints, two-thirds get six or less hours per night
By Nathan Seppa
Some members of the armed forces are strikingly short on sleep, according to a review of medical records of U.S. military personnel.
The study, which appears online January 31 in Sleep, uses data from active-duty military people who sought out, or were referred to, a clinic because they had a sleep complaint. Even though the study is not a random sample, some scientists believe the low levels of sleep found in the records raise serious questions about the health of the armed forces. Sleep problems in the study sample were often associated with conditions such as chronic pain, anxiety, brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scientists know that sleep deprivation can affect mood, concentration, reaction time and cognitive function. But little information is available specifically about sleep loss in the military.
“It’s really the first study to take a good epidemiological look at sleep in military personnel,” says Alan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio who wasn’t involved in the study.
Researchers reviewed the charts of every person who was admitted to Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma, Wash., in 2010 for sleep-related complaints and underwent polysomnography, a diagnostic test that measures physiological changes during sleep. The 725 people whose records were analyzed served in the Army, Navy or Air Force and had an average age of 36. The vast majority of the medical charts belonged to people who had been in combat, and many had been deployed to war zones multiple times.