This transversal study aimed to analyze the relationship between poor sleep quality and metabolic syndrome among university students. The sleep quality and the components of metabolic syndrome of 701 university students from Fortaleza, Brazil, were evaluated during 2011 and 2012. In the evaluation of the scale of the associations, robust Poisson regression was used, adjusted for sex and age. The prevalence of metabolic syndrome and poor quality sleep was 1.7% and 95.3% respectively. There was an increase in risk of 5% of developing metabolic syndrome among those university students who slept poorly (p=0.013). It is concluded that the university students in the sample who were poor sleepers present a greater probability of presenting metabolic syndrome.
Glucose metabolism disorders; Sleep; Students