Here's one you may have thought you knew, but now it's been confirmed: African American adults are more likely than whites to miss sleep, according to a new study, with the gap especially wide for black professionals.
The study, from the Harvard School of Public Health, focused on "short sleepers." Those are adults who routinely get less than seven hours of sleep per night. Short sleepers make up 29% of the population as a whole, but the practice is more common (37%) among blacks than whites (28%) in a nationally representative survey of 136,815 men and women, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
Researchers don't know why the gap exists, but they are concerned. Sleeping less than seven hours per night is linked with higher risk of early death and problems with obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes. Since African Americans also suffer higher mortality rates in all these health concerns, it's a "chicken and egg" question that could keep one up at night.
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