ORIGINAL ARTICLE Sleep Disturbances Are Mediators Between Socioeconomic Status and Health: a Scoping Review Dimitrios Papadopoulos 1 & FA Etindele Sosso 2 & Tommy Khoury 3 & Salim R. Surani 4 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020 Abstract Understanding the etiology of socioeconomic disparities in health could assist public health authorities in preventing the morbidity of socially disadvantaged individuals. We undertook a scoping review to test the hypothesis that poor sleep is located in the pathway from low socioeconomic status (SES) to poor health. After electronic database searching, we included observational studies with general population participants that presented mediation effects of sleep parameters on the association between SES levels and various health measures. For each comparison across studies, we charted total, direct, and indirect effects and mediation propor- tion and compared them by health outcome measure and by direction of mediation effect. Twenty articles met our inclusion criteria. Only half of the analyses yielded mediation effects in the expected direction, the rest being mostly non-significant. Sleep measures explained 29% of the SES-mental health gradient, but much lower proportions for other outcomes. More research is needed to clarify the impact of sleep on the social gradient in health. Keywords Socioeconomic status . Sleep . Health disparities . Mediation . Scoping review Rationale Objectives The existence of a social gradient in health and disease has been consistently demonstrated in epidemiological research (Adler et al. 1994; P. A. Braveman et al. 2010; Mackenbach et al. 2008; International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-020-00378-x * Dimitrios Papadopoulos d.g.papadopoulos@gmail.com 1 Department of Pulmonology, Army Share Fund Hospital, Athens, Greece 2 Center of advanced research in sleep medicine, Research Center of Cognitive Neurosciences, Health and Society Institute, Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur de Montréal, Québec, Canada 3 Département des Sciences Biomédicales, Université de Montréal, Montréal,, Québec, Canada 4 Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine, Texas A&M University, Health Science Center, College Station, TX, USA