标题：Deconstructing athletes’ sleep: A systematic review of the influence of age, sex, athletic expertise, sport type, and season on sleep characteristics
摘要：Highlights
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Several exercise- and sports-related parameters such as sex, age, athletic expertise, training season, and sports type are discussed. These factors may potentially influence sleep quantity and architecture.
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Overall, sleep quantity and quality in athletes is reduced and potentially insufficient, in comparison to the general consensus of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine for non-athlete healthy adults.
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Specifically, young athletes, mainly of Asian origin, showed poor sleep quality, with low efficiency and long wake after sleep onset. Sleep architecture data for specific athletic populations, such as female athletes, were lacking in the literature.
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Further research on athletes according to sex and age is needed in order to establish sleep recommendations and promote sleep-optimizing interventions, especially for child and adolescent athletes.
Purpose
This systematic review aimed to describe objective sleep parameters for athletes under different conditions and address potential sleep issues in this specific population.
Methods
PubMed and Scopus were searched from inception to April 2019. Included studies measured sleep only via objective evaluation tools such as polysomnography or actigraphy. The modified version of the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale was used for the quality assessment of the studies.
Results
Eighty-one studies were included, of which 56 were classified as medium quality, 5 studies as low quality, and 20 studies as high quality. A total of 1830 athletes were monitored over 18,958 nights. Average values for sleep-related parameters were calculated for all athletes according to sex, age, athletic expertise level, training season, and type of sport. Athletes slept on average 7.2 ± 1.1 h/night (mean ± SD), with 86.3% ± 6.8% sleep efficiency (SE). In all datasets, the athletes’ mean total sleep time was <8 h. SE was low for young athletes (80.3% ± 8.8%). Reduced SE was attributed to high wake after sleep onset rather than sleep onset latency. During heavy training periods, sleep duration and SE were on average 36 min and 0.8% less compared to pre-season and 42 min and 3.0% less compared to in-season training periods, respectively.
Conclusion
Athletes’ sleep duration was found to be short with low SE, in comparison to the general consensus for non-athlete healthy adults. Notable sleep issues were revealed in young athletes. Sleep quality and architecture tend to change across different training periods.
Graphical Abstract
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