Reports from a large number of studies document significant associations between sleep duration and various health problems such as cardiovascular events, risk of stroke, incident artery calcification, changes in inflammatory markers and many more. Furthermore, some sleep duration studies have shown that shorter sleep precedes some adverse health outcomes, although a causal relationship has yet to be demonstrated.

Whilst clinical studies have shown that de-fragmenting (reducing awakenings and improving sleep continuity) sleep can reverse the harmful consequences of sleep apnea, and other studies have demonstrated that adjunctive treatment of insomnia improves depression, evidence that treatment of insomnia results in health benefit is more controversial.

This article documents the debate session from the 6th International Sleep Disorders Forum – The Art of Good Sleep, held in Toronto, Canada in September 2008; the topic of which was “Does an improvement in sleep positively impact on health?”