Hamlet was certainly not the only person who had issues with sleep. Problems related to sleep—trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, waking up early in the morning, feeling tired despite sleeping 8 hours or more, or simply not getting enough hours in—are epidemic in modern society. Between the pressures of work and family, and the desire for leisure time activity, there simply do not seem to be enough hours in the day. And when most people make priorities, sleep is one of the first things sacrificed.

To make matters worse, even when we try to put aside 8 hours a night to sleep, any number of influences can make this sleep far less restful than it should be. Indeed, America is becoming a culture of sleeplessness. Just as this trend is on the upswing, scientists are uncovering evidence of the serious health implications of insufficient or inadequate sleep.

So today we face challenges completely different from fighting off the sandman. First, sleep researchers are demonstrating that adequate rest ranks as high as nutrition and exercise as behaviors that are essential to maintaining good health. Second, physicians and their patients need to become more aware that sleep difficulties are health problems that can be addressed.

The Center for the Advancement of Health, based in Washington, DC, defines sleep as "a dynamic behavior during which important physiological changes take place, both in the brain and in the body." Sleep affects many aspects of mental and physical well-being, and thus has a significant effect on our ability to think and function.

Yet, most American adults get less sleep than they need: adults on average sleep six hours and 54 minutes, more than an hour less than the eight and one-quarter hours recommended by sleep experts. In addition, about one-third of adults sleep less than six and a half hours per night, and almost half are willing to sleep less to get more work done.

In a 1999 study that looked at the effects of sleep deprivation, researchers restricted their subjects—11 healthy young men—to only four hours of sleep per night for six nights. Blood samples subsequently taken from the subjects reflected impaired glucose tolerance similar to a pre-diabetic state, and also showed reduced levels of growth hormone and cortisol. The effects were eerily similar to those seen with normal aging, leading the researchers to conclude that restricted sleep may increase the severity of age-related illnesses.

Other studies reveal a critical relationship between sleep and immune system health. In an investigation of elderly widows and widowers whose sleep was disrupted from bereavement-related depression, the subjects were found to have weakened immune function. In addition, laboratory animals' ability to survive a bacterial infection has been linked to the amount of deep sleep the they get during the first 12 hours of infection. In other studies, lab rats who are totally deprived of sleep for four weeks die of opportunistic infection.

Despite its importance to health, and the finding that 62% of adults experience a sleep problem at least a few nights per week, most primary care physicians are not comfortable with issues related to sleep and don't ask patients about their sleep habits or whether they experience sleep difficulties. One reason is that sleep information is not usually covered as part of regular patient histories.

The Sleep Assessment is thus designed to fill a crucial gap in conventional healthcare.