A study recently published in The Lancet produced normative values for sleep data in healthy adults, which may help aid in future research, particularly when obtaining polysomnographic control data is difficult.

Researchers included 5273 participants from 169 studies that were published between 2007 and 2016 in this meta-analysis. These studies included data on polysomnographic parameters collected overnight using recent American Academy of Sleep Medicine scoring criteria.

Any studies including participants with treatments or conditions that might affect sleep were excluded. Pooled estimates of 14 polysomnographic factors constituted the study end points, using a random-effects generic inverse meta-analysis to estimate each factor. Multivariate mixed-effects meta-regressions were used to assess the effects of sex and age.