MONDAY, Sept. 18 (HealthDay News) -- Cigarette smoking causes disturbances in sleep that may be reversed by quitting smoking, according to the results of a sleep study published in the Sept. 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. The authors suggest the disturbances may be due to nicotine or nicotine withdrawal.
Naresh M. Punjabi, M.D., from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and colleagues assessed the influence of cigarette smoking on sleep architecture among 6,400 participants in the Sleep Heart Health Study. Polysomnography was used to measure total sleep time, latency to sleep onset, sleep efficiency and percentage of time in each sleep stage.
The investigators found that current smokers had 5.4 minutes longer initial sleep latency, 14 minutes less total sleep time, more stage 1 sleep and less slow wave sleep than never smokers. There were no sleep architecture differences between never smokers and past smokers, suggesting that sleep disturbances can be resolved by quitting smoking.
"We conclude that the consequences of cigarette smoking extend beyond the long list of well-established causal and detrimental effects on health to sleep," the authors write. "With a better understanding of the adverse effects of cigarette smoking on sleep architecture, methods of smoking cessation might be tailored to curtail the disruption of sleep that is, in part, related to withdrawal from nicotine."
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