Efeitos a curto e longo prazo da atividade física sobre a saúde do sono em uma coorte de nascimentos

Abstract

Literature has shown that sleep plays an essential role in health. Individuals with adequate sleep duration and/or good sleep quality show lower risk for obesity, depression, chronic diseases and mortality. A good sleep health is also important to cognition and academic achievement. A sleep problem description using data from the National Health Survey was carried out in this Thesis. Data showed that sleep problems and daytime fatigue reached 15% and 11% in the Brazilian population respectively. Regarding factors which have influence on sleep, physical activity (PA) emerges in literature as a protector to negative sleep outcomes such as inadequate duration, poor sleep quality and daytime sleepiness. Therefore, a review study was carried out and found that PA decreases the odds to long sleep duration, insomnia and poor sleep quality. Results about short sleep duration are still unclear. Studies included in this review are very heterogeneous and instruments used to measure sleep and PA are not standardized. Considering short- and long- term effect of PA, two analyses were performed with a sample of the Pelotas 1993 birth cohort. The first study evaluated the effect of PA during adolescence on sleep at 22 years and did not find any clear evidence of long-term effect of PA. The second study evaluated data from one week of accelerometry and aspects from PA such as time of performance and intensities were tested. Results showed that morning light PA increased sleep efficiency to both men and women and total sleep time only to women. On the other hand, any intensity of night PA decreased total sleep time. Thus, it is possible to conclude that a relevant part of the Brazilian population is affected by sleep problems. PA does not seem to have long-term effect on sleep, but short-term analysis showed that PA effect on sleep depends on the period of the day it is performed.