Sex, Sleep Duration, and the Association of Cognition: Findings from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study

Background: We aimed to examine the association between sleep duration and cognitive impairment among elderly Chinese people. Methods: generalized linear modeling was used to analyze the baseline data for adults aged 65 years and over (n = 4785) selected from the 2011 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). The two aspects of cognitive impairment assessed in the study were mental status and memory. Sex-stratified logistic regression models were conducted to identify the effect of sleep duration in the different gender groups. Results: of all the participants, 49.8% were females and 32.5% aged 75 years and over. Of the participants, 59.7% had short sleep duration (< 7 h/day), and 9.0% of them had long sleep duration (> 8 h/day). Compared to normal sleep duration, long sleep duration was associated with lower mental status scores (beta = -0.43, p = 0.001) and lower memory scores (beta = -0.26, p = 0.006). Long sleep duration was associated with lower mental status in both men (beta = -0.37, p = 0.033) and women (beta = -0.46, p = 0.025), however, only in men was long sleep duration found to be associated with low memory scores (beta = -0.26, p = 0.047). Conclusions: Our study showed that long sleep duration was significantly associated with poorer mental status and memory scores in elderly Chinese people. Paying greater attention to the effects of sleep patterns on the risk of cognitive decline may yield practical implications for dementia prevention and health promotion, especially among older women with lower educational attainment, living in rural areas, and those who have long sleep duration.