Sleep disturbances and sleep deprivation are common in modern society. Increasingly, populations have been subjected to a steady constant decline in the number of hours devoted to sleep, due to changes in a variety of environmental and social conditions. Through the application of epidemiological methods of investigation, sleep deprivation has been shown to be associated with a variety of chronic conditions and health outcomes, detectable across the entire lifespan, from childhood to adulthood to older age. Sleep medicine is rapidly being recognized as a growing area of clinical medicine, affecting wide-ranging specialists including respiratory physicians, neurologists, cardiologists, and psychiatrists. However, it also has huge implications in the fields of epidemiology, public health, and preventive medicine. This book summarizes the epidemiological evidence linking sleep deprivation and disruption to several chronic conditions, and explores the public health implications with the view to developing preventive strategies.
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Cappuccio et al. (2010) studied this question.