@article{ref1,
title="Neighborhood stress and autonomic nervous system activity during sleep",
journal="Sleep",
year="2018",
author="Mellman, Thomas Alan and Bell, Kimberly Ann and Abu-Bader, Soleman Hassan and Kobayashi, Ihori",
volume="41",
number="6",
pages="e059-e059",
abstract="OBJECTIVES: Stressful neighborhood environments are known to adversely impact health and contribute to health disparities but underlying mechanisms are not well understood. Healthy sleep can provide a respite from sustained sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activity. Our objective was to evaluate relationships between neighborhood stress and nocturnal and daytime SNS and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity. <br><br>METHODS: Eighty five urban-residing African Americans (56.5% female; mean age of 23.0) participated. Evaluation included surveys of neighborhood stress and sleep-related vigilance; and continuous ECG and actigraphic recording in participants' homes from which heart rate variability (HRV) analysis for low frequency/high frequency (LF/HF) ratio and normalized high frequency (nHF), as indicators of SNS and PNS activity, respectively, and total sleep time (TST), and wake after sleep onset were derived. <br><br>RESULTS: All significant relationships with HRV measures were from the sleep period. Neighborhood disorder correlated negatively with nHF (r = -.24, p =.035). There were also significant correlations of HRV indices with sleep duration and sleep fears. Among females, LF/HF correlated with exposure to violence, r =.39, p =.008 and nHF with census tract rates for violent crime (r = -.35, p =.035). In a stepwise regression, TST accounted for the variance contributed by violent crime to nHF in the female participants. <br><br>CONCLUSIONS: Further investigation of relationships between neighborhood environments and SNS/PNS balance during sleep and their consequences, and strategies for mitigating such effects would have implications for health disparities.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0161-8105",
doi="10.1093/sleep/zsy059",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsy059"
}