Sleep duration and quality may impact cancer survival rate

A new study suggests that pre-diagnostic short sleep duration and frequent snoring were associated with significantly poorer cancer-specific survival, particularly among women with breast cancer.

Results show that stratified by cancer site, short sleep duration and frequent snoring were associated with significantly poorer breast cancer-specific survival.

"Our results suggest that sleep duration is important for breast cancer survival, particularly in women who snore," said lead author Amanda Phipps, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Wash. and assistant member at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

The research abstract was published recently in an online supplement of the journal Sleep and will be presented Wednesday, June 10, in Seattle, Washington, at SLEEP 2015, the 29th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

The study group comprised of 21,230 women diagnosed with a first primary invasive cancer during follow-up from the Women's Health Initiative (WHI). Participants provided information on several sleep attributes at study baseline, including sleep duration, snoring, and components of the WHI Insomnia Rating Scale. Analyses were adjusted for age at enrollment, study arm, cancer site, marital status, household income, smoking, physical activity, and time-lag between baseline data collection and cancer diagnosis.