Better sleep health in young adults tied to reduced alcohol use: Study

USA: Better sleep health may improve drinking behaviors and intoxication dynamics, suggests a recent study in the Sleep journal. This may have implications for interventions that target sleep as a mechanism to reduce heavy drinking. The findings were also presented at the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (SLEEP) 2022 Annual Meeting. 

The study stated that young adults who went to sleep earlier and slept longer on average tended to have less use of alcohol the next day, and using less alcohol in turn improved sleep in them. 

Previous studies have shown that young adults can be resistant to drinking interventions, but focusing on other health behaviors such as sleep may indirectly lessen hazardous drinking. Evidence establishing an association between sleep to next-day drinking among regular drinkers could support sleep interventions as an indirect pathway to reducing alcohol misuse. 

David Reichenberger, The Pennsylvania State University, and colleagues investigated this connection in the natural environments of 222 regularly drinking young adults.

Regularly drinking young adults (21-29 years; 63% women) were made to wear an alcohol monitor for six days. The meter continuously measured transdermal alcohol concentration (TAC). Previous night number of drinks and sleep were reported by the participants through daily smartphone-based surveys. Predictors were disaggregated into within- and between-person variables.

Next-day alcohol use was predicted by using sleep variables, and subsequent sleep was predicted using alcohol use variables. The adjustments of Multilevel Poisson and linear models were done with random intercepts for each outcome for weekends, sex, weight, and prior night sleep/drinking.