Prevalence of Healthy Sleep Duration among Adults--United States, 2014.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Cross-sectional population survey (BRFSS surveillance data)
PubMed 26890214 · doi:10.15585/mmwr.mm6506a1
What was done
The CDC analyzed cross-sectional data from the 2014 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) covering 444,306 adult respondents across all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The study assessed the prevalence of healthy sleep duration, defined as 7 or more hours per 24-hour period, and examined variations by race/ethnicity and geographic location.
What was found
Overall, 65.2% of respondents reported sleeping 7 or more hours per night, meaning more than one third reported sleeping less than 7 hours. Age-adjusted prevalence of healthy sleep was lower among non-Hispanic Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and multiracial respondents compared with non-Hispanic White, Hispanic, and Asian respondents. State prevalence ranged from 56.1% in Hawaii to 71.6% in South Dakota, with the lowest prevalence clustered in the southeastern United States and along the Appalachian Mountains, and the highest prevalence in the Great Plains states.
Why it matters
These findings provide nationwide surveillance confirming that more than a third of American adults receive insufficient sleep, while pinpointing specific racial, ethnic, and regional disparities to guide public health campaigns and workplace shift policies.
Limits
Sleep duration was solely self-reported rather than objectively measured via actigraphy or polysomnography. As a cross-sectional survey, it cannot determine causal relationships, and the abstract does not provide exact numeric prevalence rates or confidence intervals for individual racial and ethnic subgroups.
Cited by
- supports Approximately one in three people in the United States experiences some form of sleep complaint or problem.