One reason the rich may live longer than people who are poor is that rich people get more sleep.
Researchers at the University of Chicago looked at nearly 700 adults in Chicago and compared sleep characteristics by sex and race. Blacks got less sleep than whites and women got less sleep than men.
The researchers initially thought that people with high income, high status jobs would report less sleep, but that turned out not to be true. This finding could help to explain why blacks suffer from more health problems than whites.
Not only did researchers rely on the study participants self-report, but they also monitored them with a wristwatch-like device, called an actigraph, that recorded their body movements while they were in bed. Study participants thought they were all getting about seven hours of sleep a night but they were really getting only about six hours. White women slept, on average, 6.7 hours a night, white men, 6.1 hours, black women, 5.9 and black men slep only 5.1 hours a night. These racial and sex differences remained even after the researchers took into account such things as socioeconomic status, lifestyle and type of employment.
The study was published in the July 1st issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology.
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