Sleep and Multimorbidity in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging
Abstract
Sleep health is a latent construct comprising various sleep measures such as duration, quality, initiation, maintenance, and daytime sleepiness. This thesis compared the association of two measures of sleep health, a conventional summary score and a pooled index, with incident multimorbidity over a 3-year follow-up in 30,097 middle- to older-aged adults from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging. At baseline, approximately 26% and 29% of participants with multimorbidity displayed poor sleep patterns according to additive and pooled indexing methods. Longitudinal analysis indicated that those with additive scores of 4 to 5 at baseline had a 1.54 (95% CI: 1.18, 2.03) higher odds of multimorbidity compared to those with a score of 0, whereas 1-unit increases in pooled scores were associated with 1.32 (95% CI: 1.19, 1.47) odds after controlling for relevant confounders. Future research is suggested to understand the association better and inform public health and clinical guidelines.