We congratulate Drs. Basner and Dinges [1] for their analysis of US Time Use Survey (TUS) Data showing that mean adult sleep duration estimated using this method has increased over the period 2003 to 2016 possibly due to reduced leisure activities such as TV watching. Moreover, the prevalence of people sleeping longer than 9 hr has also increased. However, the title, “First Signs of Success in the Fight Against Sleep Deficiency?” is somewhat misleading. As they allude to in their introduction, we [2] have already shown that, compared with a baseline of 1985, the proportion of the US adult population sleeping longer than 9 hr had increased by 2003 using this method. The other time trend analysis of US TUS data [3] also showed the same pattern from 1985 and Basner and Dinges’ observed increase is a continuation of this trend. While there is some evidence for a decrease in sleep duration in certain adolescent populations, in most countries with available TUS data, adults have shown a stable or decreased prevalence of short sleep duration in the past three decades. Basner and Dinges confirm these findings. Thus, this paper does not demonstrate a “win” against a global sleep deficiency epidemic amongst adults that supposedly occurred in recent decades. Although widely reported in popular books and the media, [4] the evidence supporting this epidemic is limited and contested. This competitive analogy in the title diverts the reader from their important secondary finding; the prevalence of the US adult population who report sleeping longer than 9 hr has increased over the past 13 years. We should address more research efforts on assessing the nature and impact of this increase in the prevalence of “long” sleep duration, which has occurred in other OECD countries over the past few decades [2].
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