Why sleeplessness is a big public health worry

Blood pressure climbing? Putting on weight? Feeling lonely, down or grumpy? Battling with sniffles and colds often?

Research says these things might have a common link: sleep — or rather, not sleeping well.

In a large survey in the US about a third of adults already reported getting too little sleep 10 years ago; one in 10 operated on five hours or less a night. About one in 20 people said they had dozed off while driving during an earlier round of the survey. 

These are big numbers of people and it has big implications for public health around the world. 

Which is why World Sleep Day is marked every year on the Friday before the March equinox, a time when day and night is about equally long everywhere on Earth. 

Scientists have known for a long time we don’t perform well without getting proper sleep. Our productivity drops, we make poor decisions and we struggle to concentrate. More and more, though, science is starting to show how well or how much we sleep affects our body’s health. It’s no longer “an annoying interference, a wasteful state that you enter into when you do not have enough willpower to work harder and longer”. 

But why this is so, how it works and how to treat sleep problems have been almost as elusive as getting to the final number of sheep you’ve been counting for (seemingly) hours at night. 

Pinpointing a sleep disorder is nebulous, though, because “doctors that come out of medical school never really engage with sleep and sleep disorders”, Alison Bentley, a sleep doctor at the Ezintsha Sleep Clinic at the University of the Witwatersrand, told Mia Malan in Bhekisisa’s monthly TV show Health Beat. “They might not know patients have sleep problems because they're not asking those sorts of questions.”

Research from the US also shows  how well people sleep is linked to whether they earn enough money, have good education or whether they live in rural areas or a city. Yet, for people who depend on the public health system — more than three-quarters of South Africans — getting a sleep disorder diagnosed is out of reach. 

Nomathemba Chandiwana of the Ezintsha Research Centre, says “sleep medicine should not be elitist medicine”.