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Sleep Less, Live Longer

Posted by timothy on from the if-you're-reading-this dept.

Linuxathome writes: "The Washington Post carried an article describing the results of a study linking the average amount of sleep one gets per night with his/her life span. It appears that those who sleep less than 8 hours a night, live longer (optimum is 7 hours). The study (link to the abstract) was aimed at looking at the mortality rate of those suffering from insomnia. But rather than associating insomnia with increased risk of death, it appears that sleeping more than 8 hours carries a much higher risk."

2 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. Potential reasons for the outcome by BWJones · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There are many potential confounds for this study that can provide these results, most notably their use of cancer patients as subjects. Most studies to date indicate an average need for approximately 8hrs of sleep per night are needed for an adult. However, those folks that have poor quality of sleep caused by factors such as sleep apnea or pain management issues among others where the architecture of sleep and quality of sleep are radically altered would need to spend longer amounts of time "sleeping" or more appropriately time in bed to acheive the required rest due to poor quality of sleep. These causes of longer "sleep" times are themselves responsible for higher morbidity and mortality.

    Finally it should be noted that for a long time it has been known that there is a high degree of variation in the amount of sleep required by people and most of the variation is due to self reporting inconsistencies. (in other words people underreport the amount of time they actually sleep for a variety of reasons) Actual sleep recording or polysomnography narrows this variation considerably.

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  2. You can prove both things... by rseuhs · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Since I'm replying to this at 1:30 am, that means I'm going to be living for a while now...

    Babies sleep 12 hours or longer per day while old people sleep 6 hours or less per day.

    If you do the study this way (asking people at different ages how long they sleep, then look at mortality) you get obvious result that long sleep = early death. People who died at age 2 slept probably more than 12 hours/day.

    If you look at it the other way and ask for the rest life expectancy you would get exactly the opposite result: People sleeping longer have statistically a longer rest life expectancy (because they are younger, but this study ignores age, so we can ignore it, too)