BACKGROUND:

Both reported short sleep and reported long sleep are major predictors of excess mortality risk, but the importance of reported sleep duration as a risk factor is not yet known. Sleep-related risks are of special interest to The Women's Health Initiative (WHI), because insomnia increases among women at menopause, and because WHI's hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and dietary modification (DM) may influence sleep. The WHI is an exciting opportunity to examine whether risks associated with reported sleep durations can be explained by a selection of intercurrent conditions, but the broad WHI design does not control for important potential confounders. Explicitly, the broad WHI design by itself cannot determine if behaviorally-modifiable objective sleep durations are the primary risk factor.

DESIGN NARRATIVE:

This ancillary project supplemented the WHI Observational Study (OS) by performing additional examinations on 600 San Diego OS women. These volunteers underwent home sleep recordings, hormone measurement, and detailed psychiatric interviews. To facilitate distinction of affective and sleep factors in WHI outcomes, the types and severity of depression in the OS subsample and the validity and reliability of sleep items in questionnaires given to WHI women were examined.