Empirical Note: Self-Report Versus Recorded Sleep in Healthy Seniors

Although insomnia is a major public health problem in the elderly, little information concerning the relation between subjective reports of sleep and laboratory measures in the elderly has been published. Also, while laboratory studies of the healthy elderly typically show that women steep better than men, epidemiologic studies suggest that women complain more often than men about disturbed sleep. We report here a study of 20 healthy elderly subjects without sleep complaints (10M. 10F), in which relations between subjective and objective measures of sleep were explored. Both men and women showed significant correlations between objective measures of Sleep Latency (SL) and subjective estimates of fall asleep time; similarly, in both groups, subjective estimates of sleep duration were significantly and positively correlated with Time Spent Asleep (TSA). However, in the women, but not in the men, “restlessness” of sleep was significantly correlated with WASO (wake time after sleep onset), while “soundness” of sleep was positively related to amount of slow wave sleep. In general, women showed a higher proportion of significant and more stable correlations between subjective and objective measures than did men. These findings suggest that elderly women may report sleep loss more accurately than elderly men.