The majority of Americans do not regularly get the recommended amount of sleep and sleep deficiencies disproportionately burden marginalized communities. We conducted a longitudinal cohort study measuring bedroom air temperature and humidity over three non-consecutive weeks (N = 19 participants; 409 observation nights) using HOBO loggers and sleep health using wrist-actigraphy and sleep diaries. Outdoor temperature and humidity were obtained from a nearby weather station. Linear mixed-effects regression models assessed relationships between temperature and sleep health metrics. Nighttime indoor apparent temperature ranged from 26 to 35 °C and averaged 5 °C higher than outdoors. On average, participants slept 6.7 h per night with 83% sleep efficiency. After adjustment, a 5 °C increase in indoor nighttime dry bulb temperature was associated with a 23 min reduction in mean total sleep time (β = −23.30 −43.30, −3.45) and mean onset latency increase of approximately 2 min (β = 1.85 0.50, 6.65). Nighttime heat waves were associated with a 4% reduction in mean sleep efficiency (β = −3.71 −6.83, −0.66) and an 11 min increase in onset latency (β = 11.32 2.60, 20.75). We found evidence that rising summertime temperatures reduced sleep health in a disproportionately impacted community, suggesting that climate change will worsen existing sleep health disparities.
Caballero-Gómez et al. (Sat,) studied this question.