Air Pollution, Heat, Carbon Dioxide, and Noise Affect Sleep Efficiency

New observational study finds a drop in sleep efficiency for high exposures to environmental factors such as air pollution, carbon dioxide, heat, and noise.

Increased levels of air pollution in the bedroom, carbon dioxide, noise, and temperature were all linked independently to lower sleep efficiency, according to a new study published in Sleep Health. These findings highlight the importance of the bedroom environment for high-quality sleep.

The study published in Sleep Health was a collaboration between Penn Medicine and the Envirome Institute of the University of Louisville. Researchers recruited participants from the National Institutes of Health-funded Green Heart Project and investigated the effects of planting 8,000 mature trees on the cardiovascular health of Louisville residents.

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‘A quickly changing environment due to growing urbanization and climate change seems to have made it harder to get a good night's sleep.’

For each of the environmental variables measured, the researchers compared sleep efficiency during exposures to the highest 20 percent of levels versus the lowest 20 percent of levels.

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Through this analysis, they found that high noise was associated with a 4.7 percent decline in sleep efficiency compared to low noise, high carbon dioxide with a 4.0 percent decline compared to low levels, high temperature with a 3.4 percent decline compared to low temperature, and high PM2.5 with a 3.2 percent decline compared to low PM2.5.

Two other sleep environment variables, relative humidity, and barometric pressure appeared to have no significant association with sleep efficiency among the participants.

Interestingly, only bedroom humidity was associated with sleep outcomes assessed with questionnaires, such that higher humidity was associated with lower self-reported sleep quality and more daytime sleepiness.

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This suggests that studies based on questionnaires may miss important associations readily detected by objective measures of sleep. This is not surprising as humans are unconscious and unaware of themselves and their surroundings during large portions of their sleep period.

Also, most study participants rated humidity, temperature, and noise levels in the bedroom as “just right” regardless of the actual exposure levels.

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This seems to habituate subjectively to our bedroom environment and feel there is no need to improve it, when in fact our sleep may be disturbed night after night as evidenced by the objective measures of sleep used in the study.

This suggests that more research is needed now on interventions that could improve sleep efficiency by reducing exposure to these sleep-disrupting factors.

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This could be as simple as leaving a bedroom door open to lower carbon dioxide levels and using triple-pane windows to reduce noise. They also applied for funding that will allow us to investigate whether planting trees can improve sleep and cardiovascular health through improving health behaviors and the bedroom environment.

Source-Eurekalert