People living in brightly-lit neighbourhoods are more likely to suffer from disturbed and disrupted sleep patterns, a study from the US concluded in March. The study, led by Maurice Ohayon, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University in California, was due to be presented to the annual meeting last month of the American Academy of Neurology, and argued that night-time light was 'significantly' associated with sleep disturbances. The study interviewed 15,863 people by phone over an eight-year period. They were asked about sleep habits and the quality of their sleep as well as any medical and psychiatric disorders. Then, using data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, Professor Ohayon and his team looked at how much outdoor light those people were exposed to at night. This concluded that, perhaps unsurprisingly, people living in urban areas of 500,000 people or more were exposed to night-time lights that were three to six times more intense than people living in small towns and rural areas. But when it came to sleep patterns, the findings were more surprising. People living in more intense light areas were 6% more likely to sleep less than six hours per night than people in less intense light areas.
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