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Stroke Risk Spikes In Healthy Adults Who Don't Get Enough Sleep
hessian writes "Attention, busy middle-aged folks. You may be healthy and thin, but if you habitually sleep less than six hours a night, you still could be boosting your risk of a stroke. That's the surprising conclusion of a new study being presented Monday at SLEEP 2012, the annual meeting of the nation's sleep experts."
Interesting! Could it be that using the BMI as a determining factor in who is healthy and who is not is in itself a flawed concept? Perhaps the amount of sleep needed is related to caloric intake, and the caloric intake necessary to maintain a BMI less than 25 is not sufficient to avoid stroke? Certainly there is more here than meets the eye. I'd strongly recommend much further study before anyone changes their lifestyles due to this study.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
TFA, at least, doesn't even mention segmented sleep or how that might alter this alleged dynamic. Since there seems to be irrefutable evidence that the Industrial Age is the specific cause of this change in our sleep patterns and a prescriptive (if subconscious) effort to pigeonhole our sleep into one neat temporal compartment, why do these supposed experts continue to promote the Industrial Age myth of a single eight-hour sleep cycle? Why don't they consider the possibility that it might be our efforts as a civilization to force our sleep patterns into a single tightly regimented box that is causing the increased risk of stroke and other problems?
At least for the purpose of argument, I'm assuming that the statistical epidemiology is accurate; but that leaves me very curious indeed about what the mechanism is.
I wouldn't have expected getting more or less sleep to affect the structural integrity of some unlucky blood vessel in your brain. Are there any clues about why such a dramatic effect might occur?