![]() In a separate test, they underwent polysomnography. It’s from them that researchers have found evidence that the farther people live from a wealthier area, the more likely they are to develop insulin resistance-or that blacks appear to have higher levels of the substances that cause blood to clot.)įor a week, participants in the MESA study wore actigraphy bands, Fitbit-like bracelets that can estimate the amount of time a person is asleep. (More than 950 papers have been published on this cohort. The participants were pooled from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a cohort of more than 6,000 people who, for the last 15 years, have been intermittently pricked, prodded, and assessed to discover how geography and race influence health over time. This past June, the journal Sleep published a study on the sleep quality of black, white, Chinese, and Hispanic adults in six cities across the United States. The study was just one data point in a mounting pile of evidence that black Americans aren’t sleeping as well as whites. Black participants, however, spent only about 15 percent of the night in slow-wave sleep. Generally, people are thought to spend 20 percent of their night in slow-wave sleep, and the study’s white participants hit this mark. (One paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007, found that study participants who were denied slow-wave sleep for three nights-researchers would sound an alarm in their ears when they entered this sleep phase-became less sensitive to insulin, a precursor to diabetes.)īut it wasn’t just slow-wave sleep in general that interested the researchers they specifically hoped to compare how blacks and whites experienced slow-wave sleep. ![]() Slow-wave sleep is thought to be the most restorative period of sleep, and it’s important to good health: Experiments where people are denied slow-wave sleep on purpose have shown that bodies quickly change for the worse. ![]() The San Diego researchers planned to use the polysomnography machine to document slow-wave sleep-the phase of sleep “when it’s really hard to wake you up,” as Tomfohr describes it.
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