Sleep-hygiene Education improves Sleep Indices in Elite Female Athletes.
Level 4 - case-series / case-control
Single-group pre-post study with no comparison control group.
PubMed 28674597 · doi:10.70252/DNOL2901
What was done
Twenty-six elite female netball athletes completed a single-group pre-post study assessing the effect of a sleep-hygiene education session. Athletes underwent one week of baseline sleep monitoring via wrist actigraphy, attended an education session providing sleep information and practical hygiene strategies, and then underwent a second week of post-intervention actigraphy monitoring. Measured parameters included total sleep time (TST), sleep efficiency (SE%), total time in bed (TTB), sleep latency (SL), wake episodes (WE), sleep onset variance (SOV), wake variance (WV), wake episode duration (WED), sleep onset time (SOT), and wake time (WT).
What was found
Total sleep time significantly increased from PRE to POST by a mean of 22.3 ± 39.9 minutes (p = 0.01, effect size: 0.39). Significant improvements were also reported for wake variance (p = 0.03) and wake episode duration (p = 0.03). No statistically significant differences were observed for SE%, SL, TTB, WE, SOV, SOT, or WT (exact numerical values for these metrics were not reported in the abstract).
Why it matters
This indicates that a brief, low-cost sleep hygiene education session can produce acute, modest increases in sleep duration among elite female athletes.
Limits
The study used an uncontrolled, single-group design without a parallel control group, making it vulnerable to Hawthorne effects and training load confounders. The sample size was small (n = 26) and limited to female netballers, with outcomes tracked for only one week post-intervention and no assessment of long-term retention or athletic performance.
Cited by
- context In a collegiate sleep education intervention among Division I athletes, time in bed increased by an average of 40 minutes and total sleep time increased by over an hour.