Systematic review reveals mental health benefits of Ramadan fasting with mixed effects on sleep quality and cognitive functioning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ramadan fasting has been studied for its potential health benefits, including mental health. The present systematic review examined empirical evidence on the effects of Ramadan fasting on mental health and, to a limited extent, cognitive functioning. A search was carried out in PubMed/MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science between 3 January 2024 and 18 February 2024. The initial search yielded 288 articles. After removing 74 duplicates, 214 records were selected for initial screening after exclusion, and 141 articles met the criteria for full-text review. Ultimately, 20 studies were included in the final analysis. These studies were critically evaluated using the Newcastle-Ottawa scale, the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool (MMAT), and the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Critical Appraisal Checklist. The result indicated that Ramadan fasting positively affected mental health outcomes: 72.7%, 66.6%, and 85.7% of the studies reported reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety, and stress, respectively, and 71.4% improved psychological well-being. Cognitive functions improved in 50% of the studies. More than half of the studies reported a worsening (57.1%) of sleep quality during Ramadan. The risk of bias assessments indicated high methodological quality in most studies; Some minor limitations were identified, including occasional inadequate handling of confounding and issues with participant representativeness. These findings suggest that Ramadan fasting may offer mental health benefits and could serve as a culturally relevant non-pharmacological strategy to support psychological well-being in Muslim communities, with potential implications for public health policy and clinical practice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".