Sleep Duration and Oral Status in Older English Adults

Objectives: Sleep duration is important for health among older people. We examined the association between number of teeth and sleep duration in a national sample of older English people.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional study using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) wave 7 (N=9,996), however our target population was only 65 years old or older (N=5,591). The dependent variable was sleep duration (hours / day). From the previous studies, we defined “long sleep” as 9+hours,“short sleep” as <5hours, respectively. The explanatory variable was self-reported number of teeth (0, 1-9, 10-19, ≥20), while age, sex, educational attainment, annual household income, mental health condition(8 items from the CES-D), activities of daily living (ADL), and diabetes were selected as covariates. We examined the association between the number of teeth and sleep duration on the available cases of 4,213, applying multinomial logistic regression analysis.
Results: The mean age of the participants was 74.4 (SD=7.6) years old. The majority of participants reported to have 7-9hours of sleep duration (N=2,333, 52.0%), while very small proportions reported short sleep (N=155, 3.5%) or long sleep (N=1,189, 26.3%). The reference in the 7-9 hour sleep group, edentulous people had an independently and significantly higher odds for having long sleep (odds ratio [OR]= 1.32, 95% confidence interval [CI]=1.04–1.67) compared to those who had more than 20 teeth.
Conclusions: Having fewer teeth was associated with longer sleep in older English adults.