Relationships Between Internet Use and Sleep Duration in Chinese Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study

Purpose: Most studies that examined the relationship between internet use and sleep were conducted mainly in children and adolescents, and we know little about the use of internet among adults. The purpose of this study is to understand the internet use patterns of Chinese adults and to measure their associations with sleep duration from variety, frequency and type. Methods: A total of 19,730 samples were selected from 2018 data of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal study. Internet usage was obtained by specific questions, and the range of sleep period was grouped according to recommendations from the National Sleep Foundation. Kruskal-Wallis H-test and the chi-squared test were used for basic descriptive analysis, and multinomial logistic regression was used to analyze the relationships between internet use and sleep duration. Stata version 15.0 was used for data cleaning, and SPSS version 20.0 was used for statistics analysis. Results: After screening, a total of 6346 persons were included in the analysis, of which 3148 (49.61%) were males and 3198 (50.39%) were females. Age ranged from 21 to 95 years, most persons were over 45 years old, with the median age of 56 years. Only 1180 (18.59%) participants used the internet, and almost all of them used mobile phones (1137, 96.36%), the other three types were desktop computer (232, 19.66%), laptop computer (69, 5.85%) and tablet (73, 6.19%). There were 912 (77.28%) and 268 (22.71%) participants who used only one and two or more types, respectively. In the unadjusted model, both short sleep and long sleep were associated with internet use compared with normal sleep duration (0.806 [0.708-0.918] p = 0.001; 0.345 [0.251-0.475] p < 0.000). After adjusting for all covariates, the association between long sleep and internet use still persisted (0.612 [0.433-0.865] p = 0.005), but no significant difference was found in short sleep (0.929 [0.803-1.075] p = 0.325). Conclusion: Internet use was found to be closely associated with sleep and the duration of sleep negatively affected, which may provide new ideas for sleep hygiene recommendations and healthy media use. This conclusion needs more evidence to support.