Sleep and Health Among Collegiate Student Athletes.
Level 5 - mechanism / opinion, no new human data
Narrative review synthesizing existing literature without systematic search or meta-analytic methodology.
PubMed 31472156 · doi:10.1016/j.chest.2019.08.1921
What was done
This narrative review summarizes existing literature on sleep duration, quality, and patterns and their relationships with physical health, mental health, and performance domains (aerobic, anaerobic, sport-specific, cognitive) in athletes. It focuses on identifying literature gaps specific to collegiate student athletes and reviews evidence-based sleep interventions.
What was found
The abstract reports no numerical data or quantitative effect sizes. It qualitatively describes that collegiate student athletes commonly experience short sleep, which impairs physical, mental, and athletic performance, but notes that much of the available evidence is extrapolated from non-collegiate adult samples.
Why it matters
Collegiate athletes encounter unique scheduling, academic, and training pressures that predispose them to sleep deficiency, emphasizing the need for targeted sleep tracking and interventions.
Limits
The abstract provides no sample sizes, study counts, or quantitative metrics. As a narrative review, it lacks systematic search methodology and risk-of-bias evaluation. Most cited findings derive from general adult or non-collegiate athlete cohorts.
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.