Abstract P522: Racial Differences in Sleep Health in Middle-Aged Adults

Introduction: Sleep health is comprised of many dimensions, including duration, quality and sleep disorders. Prior work found that Black adults have worse sleep health than White adults, but the underlying reasons are unknown. Our goal was to examine possible determinants of racial disparities in sleep health. We hypothesized that sleep health would be worse in Black participants, and this would be partly explained by clinical, psychosocial and lifestyle risk factors. Methods: We used cross-sectional data from the sleep ancillary study to the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults (CARDIA) study. Several objective sleep measures were collected, including 7 days of wrist actigraphy and a home sleep test (Nox T3s). Sleep disordered breathing was classified by oxygen desaturation index (ODI)>=10 or apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) >=15. We used a series of regression models to calculate the percent reduction in the coefficient estimate for race in models for each sleep health metric after adjusting for clinical factors, psychosocial factors or lifestyle factors. Results: There were 565 Black and 741 White adults in this analysis (mean (SD) age 61 (3.6) years). Black adults had significantly worse sleep health based on all measures, including shorter sleep duration, lower sleep percentage, greater sleep fragmentation and higher prevalence of sleep disordered breathing compared to White adults. Clinical factors, psychosocial factors and lifestyle factors all explained a proportion of the racial differences in sleep fragmentation and sleep percentage and explained away the racial differences in sleep disordered breathing (Table). Conclusions: Racial disparities in sleep health may be partly explained by clinical factors, such as blood pressure and BMI, psychosocial factors, such as education and depression, and lifestyle factors, such as smoking, alcohol intake, and physical activity. These findings provide several potential intervention targets to improve sleep health, particularly in Black adults.