Socioeconomic Position and Excessive Daytime Sleepiness: A Systematic Review of Social Epidemiological Studies

Abstract

The objectives of this empirical study are to describe and discuss the current literature available on the relationship between excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) and the socioeconomic position (SEP) as well as to provide recommendations for consideration of SEP in sleep medicine and biomedical research. Databases Medline/PubMed, Web of Science, Google scholar and Scopus were screened from January 1990 to December 2020 using PRISMA guidelines and 20 articles were included in the final synthesis. Nineteen studies were cross-sectional and one study was longitudinal. Among these studies, 25.00% (n = 5) are focused on children and adolescent and the remaining 75.00% (n = 15) focused on adults and seniors. Ages ranged from 8 to 18 years old for children/adolescent and ranged from 18 to 102 years old for adults. Main SEP measures presented in these studies were education, income, perceived socioeconomic status and employment. The sample size in these studies varied from N = 90 participants to N = 33,865 participants. Overall, a lower educational level, a lower income and full-time employment were associated with EDS. Symptoms of EDS are prevalent in women, especially those with a low income or no job; and children and adolescents with difficult living conditions or working part time reported more sleep disturbances. SEP is already considered as an important determinant for many health outcomes, but if SEP is embedded in the experimental design in psychosomatic research, biomedical research and clinical practice as a constant variable regardless of outcome; it will move forward future investigations.