Search for: All records

A community-based qualitative study identified multilevel influences on sleep duration, quality, and timing in 10 to 12-year-old Latino pre-adolescents via 11 focus groups with 46 children and 15 interviews with parents. An iterative content analysis revealed three themes negatively and positively impacted sleep: (1) Individual-level; (2) Social-level; and (3) Environmental-level influences. At the individual level, use of technology (e.g., phones), activity levels (e.g., sitting all day), dietary intake (e.g., junk food) and emotions (e.g., stress/anxiety) were reported to impact children’s sleep. Social-level influences included interactions with peers and family members as well as time hanging out and arguing/fighting. Environmental-level influences were living in home and neighborhood settings with certain sounds (e.g., soothing music), uncomfortable temperatures, and items/things (e.g., stuffed animal) in the sleeping area. Parent reports indicated that some factors at each level were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings that influences at various levels interacted to impact sleep illustrate the need to simultaneously account for multiple levels of influence to best inform intervention development. Thus, application of social ecological models of behavior change to interventions may enhance sleep duration, quality, and timing among Latino pre-adolescents, as these models account for single as well as interacting influences to explain behavior.

 

Abstract Rationale: Genetic variation has a substantial contribution to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and lung function measurements. Heritability estimates using genome-wide genotyping data can be biased if analyses do not appropriately account for the nonuniform distribution of genetic effects across the allele frequency and linkage disequilibrium (LD) spectrum. In addition, the contribution of rare variants has been unclear. Objectives: We sought to assess the heritability of COPD and lung function using whole-genome sequence data from the Trans-Omics for Precision Medicine program. Methods: Using the genome-based restricted maximum likelihood method, we partitioned the genome into bins based on minor allele frequency and LD scores and estimated heritability of COPD, FEV1% predicted and FEV1/FVC ratio in 11 051 European ancestry and 5853 African-American participants. Measurements and Main Results: In European ancestry participants, the estimated heritability of COPD, FEV1% predicted and FEV1/FVC ratio were 35.5%, 55.6% and 32.5%, of which 18.8%, 19.7%, 17.8% were from common variants, and 16.6%, 35.8%, and 14.6% were from rare variants. These estimates had wide confidence intervals, with common variants and some sets of rare variants showing a statistically significant contribution (P-value < 0.05). In African-Americans, common variant heritability was similar to European ancestry participants, but lower sample size precluded calculation of rare variant heritability. Conclusions: Our study provides updated and unbiased estimates of heritability for COPD and lung function, and suggests an important contribution of rare variants. Larger studies of more diverse ancestry will improve accuracy of these estimates. 

Sleep duration has been associated with dementia and stroke. Few studies have evaluated sleep pattern–related outcomes of brain disease in diverse Hispanics/Latinos.

The SOL‐INCA (Study of Latinos‐Investigation of Neurocognitive Aging) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) study recruited diverse Hispanics/Latinos (35–85 years) who underwent neuroimaging. The main exposure was self‐reported sleep duration. Our main outcomes were total and regional brain volumes.

The final analytic sample includedn = 2334 participants. Increased sleep was associated with smaller brain volume (β_{total_brain} = −0.05,p < 0.01) and consistently so in the 50+ subpopulation even after adjusting for mild cognitive impairment status. Sleeping >9 hours was associated with smaller gray (β_{combined_gray} = −0.17,p < 0.05) and occipital matter volumes (β_{occipital_gray} = −0.18,p < 0.05).

We found that longer sleep duration was associated with lower total brain and gray matter volume among diverse Hispanics/Latinos across sex and background. These results reinforce the importance of sleep on brain aging in this understudied population.

Longer sleep was linked to smaller total brain and gray matter volumes.

Longer sleep duration was linked to larger white matter hyperintensities (WMHs) and smaller hippocampal volume in an obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) risk group.

These associations were consistent across sex and Hispanic/Latino heritage groups.