-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Shawn D Youngstedt, Giselle Soares Passos, Ryan S Falck, Marcos Gonçalves Santana, Inter-individual differences and reliability of the acute effects of exercise on actigraphic sleep measures, Sleep, Volume 48, Issue 3, March 2025, zsaf016, https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsaf016
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
Surveys show that exercise is considered by the general population to be perhaps the most important behavior for promoting sleep [1, 2]. Epidemiological studies have also consistently suggested that exercise is strongly associated with better sleep quantity and quality, and reduced risk of insomnia, obstructive sleep apnea, and restless legs syndrome [3–5]. Randomized controlled trials with objective sleep measures have found more modest effects of exercise on sleep [6]. However, these trials have generally focused on polysomnographic measures, which could be less sensitive to change compared with self-reports. Indeed, a comparative review and recent experimental research have indicated that the effects of exercise and hypnotics are similar both among healthy sleepers and individuals with insomnia [7, 8].
The paper by Yang et al. [9] in this volume of SLEEP examined two related issues that have not been adequately addressed: inter-individual variability in the effects of exercise on sleep, and day-to-day consistency or reliability of these effects. Inter-individual variability (heterogeneity) in various responses to exercise has received accelerated recent interest [10]. Like other effects of exercise [11], heterogeneity of the effects of exercise on sleep could be partly genetically determined, and also partly attributable to night-to-night variability in sleep per se or in response to exercise. Day-to-day consistency is commonly considered to be an indication of genetic modulation of the effects of an intervention on sleep outcomes [12], though other factors contributing to variability in sleep could confound the ability to draw conclusions about genetic effects.
Comments