Study reveals city's residents sleeping poorly

The Chinese Medical Association has named Shanghai as one of China's most sleep-deprived cities, local media reported Thursday.

The Beijing-based association put Shanghai on its list of cities where people had trouble getting a sound sleep each night, according to a report on the news website xinhuanet.com. The list was part of the association's 2013 China Sleep Quality Index, which it released to mark World Sleep Day on Thursday.

Shanghai fared better than China's other first-tier cities of Beijing and Guangzhou, which were among the five cities whose residents suffered the worst sleep in the country.

A survey of 25,000 adults in seven districts in Shanghai found that 38.2 percent of the respondents suffered from insomnia, according to a report on the news website xinmin.cn Thursday. The survey was conducted by the Shanghai Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine's Sleep Disorders Research Institute. About 75 percent of the insomniacs were between 40 and 59 years old, the xinmin.cn report said. About 1.7 times as many women as men suffered from insomnia.

The number of people who went to the hospital for sleep disorders in January and February grew by 17 percent over the same period last year. Most of those people have difficulty falling asleep and maintaining a sound sleep for months or even years, the report said.

Young people mainly have trouble falling asleep because they are overstimulated at night, Xu Jian, a professor at the Shanghai Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital, told xinmin.cn.

In a survey of 1,000 white-collar workers, 31 percent said they did not go to bed until the early morning after staying up late. It took them about an hour to fall asleep because they were overstimulated, according to xinmin.cn.

About half of the people with insomnia also suffered from anxiety because of the condition, which in turn made it harder for them to sleep.