Sleep quality, sleepiness level and their connection with obesity indicators in Brazilian military pilots

Abstract

This article aimed at evaluating sleep quality and sleepiness levels in order to connect them to obesity indicators in Brazilian military pilots. In total, 40 men answered validated questionnaires to evaluate sleep quality and daytime sleepiness, as well as an assessing form. We measured their body mass, height, perimeters (waist and hip), and body composition. We also calculated their Waist-to-height ratio (WTHR), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), and body mass index (BMI). Visceral adipose tissue was measured by magnetic resonance imaging. We used Stata 14.0 (p < 0.05) for statistical analysis. We observed that 47.5% of the pilots presented low sleep quality, 25% slept less than six hours a day, and that there are positive correlations of low magnitude between poor sleep quality with WTHR (r = 0.3364; p = 0.0338) and fat percentage (r = 0.3451; p = 0.0292). We concluded that approximately half of the individuals presented poor sleep quality, but almost all of them depicted normal daytime sleepiness.