National Sleep Foundation’s updated sleep duration recommendations: final report☆
Introduction
The question “How much sleep do we need?” is a natural and relevant question, especially for parents of children and teens and for those who care for aging parents. Sleep represents an essential element for health and well-being, including cognitive performance, physiological processes, emotion regulation, physical development, and quality of life. Appropriate sleep duration ranges vary throughout the life span. Currently, no easily accessible, validated method for individuals to measure their sleep exists. Therefore, the public and practitioners must rely on bedtime duration as a surrogate. Consequently, the National Sleep Foundation (NSF) has committed to regularly update its sleep duration recommendations to provide the public up-to-date, scientifically sound information. Unfortunately, the nature and quantity of published work precluded conducting a standard evidence-based medicine meta-analysis for each age grouping. Therefore, a multidisciplinary expert panel (“Panel”) was convened by NSF to review, discuss, and interpret extant literature.
The purpose of the present article is to provide additional information on the conversations transcribed from the Panel’s discussions and appropriateness voting. In addition, the basis by which Panel members made decisions and the issues deemed important to specific age groups are reviewed. Given the breadth of available information on the subject, citations are not provided throughout the paper. Instead, Table 1 catalogs the articles that were given to the panel for consideration during their discussions.
Section snippets
Participants and methods
The methodological details used to produce the sleep duration recommendations appear in Hirshkowitz and colleagues.1 But a brief summary is provided here.
An 18-member multidisciplinary expert Panel, comprised of sleep researchers, physicians, and experts in other areas of medicine, physiology, and science, was assembled by the NSF. Twelve representatives selected by stakeholder organizations and 6 sleep experts appointed by the NSF were included on the Panel. Organizations that sent
Results
Figure 1 illustrates the Panel’s recommendations for sleep. Recommended durations, expressed in hours per day, are shown.
The recommendations consider overall health and well-being, as well as cognitive, emotional, and physical health. Information relating to each age grouping along with the Panel’s considerations and caveats appear below.
Discussion
This analysis considered extant scientific literature, medical literature, and the Panel’s own professional experience. Their interpretation of these data sources produced consensus recommendations for sleep time duration recommendations for each age group. Consequently, the NSF updated its recommendations for sleep durations across the life span.
The “possibly acceptable” range underscores considerable individual variability in sleep durations. The Panel emphasizes that some individuals might
Acknowledgments
Literature review team: John Herman, PhD; David Brown, PhD; and Chelsea Vaughn, PhD.
Research assistants: Jenna Faulkner, Luca Calzoni, Ben Getchell, and Taylor Nelson.
References (2)
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National Sleep Foundation’s sleep time duration recommendations: methodology and results summary
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The RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method user’s manual
(2001)
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Endorsed by the National Sleep Foundation, American Association of Anatomists, American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, American Geriatrics Society, American Physiological Society, American Thoracic Society, Gerontological Society of America, Human Anatomy and Physiology Society, and Society for Research in Human Development.