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Sleep Heart Health Study

What

Multi-cohort study focused on sleep-disordered breathing and cardiovascular outcomes.

Who

5,804 adults aged 40 and older.

When

Two exam cycles, 1995-1998 and 2001-2003. Cardiovascular disease outcomes were tracked until 2010.

Funding

National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute

About

The Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS) is a multi-center cohort study implemented by the National Heart Lung & Blood Institute to determine the cardiovascular and other consequences of sleep-disordered breathing. It tests whether sleep-related breathing is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, all cause mortality, and hypertension.  In all, 6,441 men and women aged 40 years and older were enrolled between November 1, 1995 and January 31, 1998 to take part in SHHS Visit 1. During exam cycle 3 (January 2001- June 2003), a second polysomnogram (SHHS Visit 2) was obtained in 3,295 of the participants. CVD Outcomes data were monitored and adjudicated by parent cohorts between baseline and 2011. More than 130 manuscripts have been published investigating predictors and outcomes of sleep disorders. Click here for a full description of SHHS.

Read more about SHHS at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT00005275).

Citation and acknowledgement

When using this dataset, please cite the following:

Zhang GQ, Cui L, Mueller R, Tao S, Kim M, Rueschman M, Mariani S, Mobley D, Redline S. The National Sleep Research Resource: towards a sleep data commons. J Am Med Inform Assoc. 2018 Oct 1;25(10):1351-1358. doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocy064. PMID: 29860441; PMCID: PMC6188513.

Quan SF, Howard BV, Iber C, Kiley JP, Nieto FJ, O'Connor GT, Rapoport DM, Redline S, Robbins J, Samet JM, Wahl PW. The Sleep Heart Health Study: design, rationale, and methods. Sleep. 1997 Dec;20(12):1077-85. PMID: 9493915.

Please include the following text in the Acknowledgements:

The Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS) was supported by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute cooperative agreements U01HL53916 (University of California, Davis), U01HL53931 (New York University), U01HL53934 (University of Minnesota), U01HL53937 and U01HL64360 (Johns Hopkins University), U01HL53938 (University of Arizona), U01HL53940 (University of Washington), U01HL53941 (Boston University), and U01HL63463 (Case Western Reserve University). The National Sleep Research Resource was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R24 HL114473, 75N92019R002).

Data overview

/datasets (introduction)
Core data from SHHS Visit 1 and Visit 2, as well as longitudinal CVD Outcomes tracking.

/polysomnography (introduction)
Overnight polysomnography (PSG) data from SHHS Visit 1 and Visit 2.

Protocols and manuals

Analysis

Equipment

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Analysis

Read about the methods, validation, and results for the NSRR HRV analysis efforts. There are summary datasets available and the included variables can be browsed here.

EEG Biomarkers

Dataset of 5782 observations of 64 EEG biomarker variables supplied by Magdy Younes, a number of relevant resources (such as Younes et al. 2021) are included in variable descriptions. The full set of variables can be browsed here.

Methods in Biostatistics with R

NSRR user Ciprian Crainiceanu and colleagues wrote an E-book titled Methods in Biostatistics with R that uses a subset of SHHS data for many coding examples. The book-specific dataset is available here for download.

Recent changes

Publication links

National Sleep Research Resource
Sleep Heart Health Study