May: Prevalence of insomnia symptoms in England | News and Features

The study aimed to investigate how useful GP data is in measuring how many people experience insomnia symptoms. The researchers used data from the UK Biobank, a database that contains health, genetic and lifestyle information on about half a million participants.

The research team directly compared the percentage of English participants reporting insomnia symptoms in a questionnaire completed when they registered with the UK Biobank, with the same people’s linked GP records.

The study found that 29 percent of the sample reported having symptoms of insomnia. Of these, only 10 percent had insomnia symptoms documented in their GP records.

Most notably, the study also found that more than a quarter of people with insomnia symptoms recorded in their GP records in the month immediately before completing the UK Biobank questionnaire and having an associated prescription for insomnia medication did not report that they had insomnia symptoms. in the questionnaire.

This may be due to the stigma associated with insomnia or because medication reduces symptoms. Either way, it suggests that GP data may play a crucial role in identifying people with insomnia who are not captured in the questionnaire data.

The researchers found that many of the characteristics of people who visited their GP with insomnia symptoms were similar to those who reported insomnia symptoms in the questionnaire. These include being female, older, having poorer physical and mental health, smoking, having a high caffeine intake and low levels of exercise.

However, the cases of insomnia identified in the GP data were more likely to involve snoring. This may be due to the fact that insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea – of which snoring is a symptom – often occur together.

Melanie de Lange, a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD candidate in epidemiology at Bristol Medical School: Population Health Sciences (PHS) and MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit, and author of the study, said: “GP data provides rich longitudinal data on common health conditions which are not necessarily picked up by other data sources. Using GP data linked directly to the UK Biobank, we were able to gain detailed insights into the characteristics of people suffering from insomnia from GPs, including depression, diabetes, anxiety and arthritis.”

The study findings suggest that, in addition to providing a useful measure of the impact of insomnia on NHS resources, the UK Biobank GP data is a valuable source of information for researchers wishing to investigate the risk factors for insomnia.

This is especially useful when these risk factors are lifestyle choices, such as smoking or exercising, which can be targets for interventions to help prevent or reduce insomnia symptoms. Because insomnia itself has been linked to a range of other health problems, including depression, dementia and diabetes, it could have a beneficial impact on people’s wider health.

Currently linked GP data is only available for less than half of UK Biobank participants. This is despite participants giving permission for UK Biobank to access their medical records when they signed up more than 15 years ago.

Data release is currently controlled by individual GPs, who may not have the time or may be concerned about the regulations around sharing the data. It is hoped that in the future the GP details of all participants will become centrally available via NHS Digital. This would help accelerate research into the wide range of common health problems treated in primary care.

Paper

‘Prevalence of insomnia symptoms in England: a comparison of cross-sectional self-reported data and primary care records in the UK Biobank’ by Melanie A de Lange, Sophie V Eastwood, Rebecca C Richmond and Neil M Davies in BMJ opened (open access)

More information

About the British Biobank
UK Biobank is a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing anonymised genetic, lifestyle and health information and biological samples from half a million UK participants. It is the most comprehensive and widely used dataset of its kind and is accessible worldwide to recognized researchers conducting health-related research in the public interest, whether from academic, commercial, government or charitable institutions. UK Biobank helps advance modern medicine and enable a better understanding of the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of serious and life-threatening diseases – including cancer, heart disease and stroke. More than 30,000 researchers from over 90 countries are registered to use UK Biobank and as a result more than 10,000 peer-reviewed articles have been published. UK Biobank is supported by Wellcome and the Medical Research Council, as well as the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK, the National Institute for Health and Care Research and the UK Government’s Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, Griffin Catalyst and Schmidt Futures.

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About the MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU)
The University of Bristol’s MRC Integrative Epidemiology Unit (IEU) conducts some of the most advanced health science research in Britain. It uses genetics, population data and experimental interventions to search for the underlying causes of chronic diseases. The unit uses the latest developments in genetic and epigenetic technologies. They develop new analytical methods to improve our understanding of how our family background behaviors and our genes interact to influence health outcomes.