My abstract for the 2013 Obesity Society Annual Meeting
Subjective and Objective Methods to Examine Sleep Amount in Free-Living Families
Shiny Parsai, Randal Foster, Lorraine M. Lanningham-Foster Ames, IABackground: Obesity and sleep insufficiency appear to be linked, possibly due to excess energy intake during wake time contributing to weight gain. To better understand the relationship between insufficient sleep and obesity, we need accurate and practical tools to quantify sleep. The purpose of this study was to compare two objective tools and one subjective tool to study sleep in free-living families. Methods: The study included 18 families (10 men, 17 women, 11 boys, and 5 girls). Subjects participated in a week-long study to monitor their sleep using an accelerometer (MSR145), a pattern-recognition system (SenseWear WMS® Mini armband), and sleep logs. BMI was calculated using height and weight and body composition was measured using air displacement plethysmography (BOD POD®). The objective tools were compared to the sleep log using regression analyses. Post-hoc tests were used with ANOVA and ANCOVA with a Bonferroni correction applied to give an overall significance level of P < 0.05. Results: The objective tools estimated similar sleep duration data from the subjects when compared with the sleep log. The accelerometer had a better correlation than the pattern recognition system when compared with the sleep log (0.399 vs. 0.1785, respectively). Sleep duration was inversely correlated with age for all measurement tools. Conclusions: Future additional studies targeting free-living families to study sleep amount and obesity using these objective tools would be beneficial. It is also possible that the relationship between sleep duration and obesity may be explored in existing data sets where these objective measurement tools have been employed for other purposes such as physical activity assessment.
