Women’s Health and Sleep Disorders

Abstract

Many issues related to women and sleep across the lifespan have evolved since the early descriptive studies of the 1960s and 1970s that controlled for healthy lifestyle behaviors and body weight and smoking. Before 2001, many researchers either avoided women as volunteer participants, or failed to describe their reproductive status. With more focus on sleep disorders in the twenty-first century, reproductive status and other health and lifestyle characteristics need to be included in descriptions of the samples that include women. Today, most government sponsors require inclusion of women in research studies, however we are still contending with the smaller samples of women that preclude any statistical analyses by sex, and reconciling the differences between self-reported sleep complaints and objective PSG or actigraphy measures. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)