China: Study on Sleep Duration and Pregnancy Outcomes

A recent study in the Journal of Diabetes Investigation found that short/long sleep duration is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, particularly with increased gestational diabetes risk.

The majority of pregnant women are affected by sleep problems. Considerable changes in hormone levels, nocturnal awakenings, physical discomfort, and fertility-related anxiety during pregnancy may lead to poor sleep quality, insufficient sleep time, sleep-disordered breathing (SDB), insomnia, and restless legs syndrome (RLS).

Against the above background, Wenfang Yang, The First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University, Maternal & Child Health Center, Xi'an, Shaanxi, P.R. China, and colleagues aimed to evaluate whether sleep duration is associated with pregnancy outcomes and whether they were modified by important characteristics of studies in a meta-analysis.

For this purpose, the researchers searched the online databases for studies related to maternal sleep duration and adverse pregnancy outcomes before 30 June 2021. Risk of bias assessment, subgroup analyses, and sensitivity analysis were conducted. The relative risks (RR) or odds ratios (OR) were used to estimate the pooled effects.

Salient Findings of the Study

• 5246 references were identified through database searching, 41 studies were included in the study.
• Pregnant women with short sleep duration had a 1.81 times risk of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM).
• The association between short sleep duration and the risk of gestational hypertension (GH), cesarean section (CS), low birth weight (LBW), preterm birth (PTB), and small for gestational age (SGA) were not significant.
• Long sleep duration was significantly correlated with GDM (OR 1.24) and CS (OR 1.13), while long sleep duration was not linked with GH, LBW, PTB, and SGA.

"We found that short/long sleep duration is associated with adverse pregnancy outcome, specifically with an increased risk of gestational diabetes mellitus," wrote the authors. Therefore, sleep should be systematically screened in the obstetric population, they added.

Reference

Wang, R., Xu, M., Yang, W., Xie, G., Yang, L., Shang, L., Zhang, B., Guo, L., Yue, J., Zeng, L. and Chung, M.C. (2022), Maternal sleep during pregnancy and adverse pregnancy outcomes: a systematic review and meta-analysis. J Diabetes Investig. Accepted Author Manuscript. https://doi.org/10.1111/jdi.13770