Relationship among Sleep Quality Physical Health Conditions and Lifestyle Habits among Elementary School Students

The purpose of this research was to reveal the relationship among students’ sleep quality, body temperature and lifestyle habits, growth and their physical strength. Subjects were 226 elementary school students from first grade to sixth grade, in four elementary schools at the Chugoku and Shikoku areas in Japan. The study period was from October 2014 to December 2015. Evaluation items used were the PSQI (Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Japanese version), body temperature, lifestyle habits, and national physical fitness test. Relationships were analyzed using Pearson’s chi square test, Fisher’s exact test, residual analysis, φ-coefficient, odds ratio and 95% confidence interval, and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient using SPSS 20 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, USA). The level of statistical significance was set at 0.05. The number of students with good sleep quality who showed less than six-point score at the PSQI was 218 (96.5%), and with poor sleep quality were eight students (3.5%). Especially, “sometimes do not eat breakfast” and “had difficulty sleeping” were independent risk factors for negative arousal. In the lifestyle habits, it was observed significantly that students who had a good sleep ate breakfast every morning. The significant positive correlation was between sleep quality and the time spent watching television, the age and the time using the internet. The significant negative correlation was observed between length of sleep, time spent watching television, using internet and playing games, body temperature and age. The students with temperature of less than 36°C were 35 (15.5%). Those students did not eat breakfast every morning, or ate school lunch. This study revealed that sleep condition and temperature of elementary school students were related to eating breakfast and using media time. It was considered very important to educate the students and their guardians that eating breakfast is a necessity and adjusting the use of multimedia, so that students can acquire desirable lifestyle habits.