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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."
Time to cut back on that gaming all nighters once you hit 30 then.
Need to get as many as possible until then!
But only if you have a normal Body Mass Index (BMI).
FTFA
In people who fell into normal weight categories -- a body mass index of 18.5 to nearly 25 -- those who reported sleeping less than six hours a night were at about 4.5 times greater risk of developing stroke symptoms than whose who slept seven and eight hours a night. Surprisingly, that increase wasn't apparent in overweight or obese people who slept less.
The increased stroke risk ONLY OCCURRED IN NORMALLY SIZED PATIENTS
The application of this study to the Slashdot population should be obvious. Not to worry.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Always trying to get us to sleep more, they only want you to sleep more so they can keep making their fat profits at your expense.
Wake up sheeple!
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?
The increased stroke risk ONLY OCCURRED IN NORMALLY SIZED PATIENTS
Never mind all that. The real gem is this:
those who reported sleeping less than six hours a night were at about 4.5 times greater risk of developing stroke symptoms...
So they didn't actually measure how much sleep the subjects got. They just took their word on it. Given that some people will overestimate or underestimate their sleep, this could just mean that the people who tend to underreport their sleep are the same people who tend to have strokes.
Basically, the study is useless.
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?
This is a chicken-and-egg mystery. Concluding that the health risk is because of bad sleep is just a statistically qualified conclusion.
People often cannot sleep because of a lot of different problems. Most of them are diffuse, and sadly often treated by medicines that just help you sleep or similar.
Finding the cause of why you can't sleep is very time consuming and often impossible by current technology, unless you believe Dr House is a representative of the average doctor.
The heart is a muscle like any other; it needs to have a break. This is called sleep and should last at least 5-6 hours every day. When you cannot sleep, it might be because the circulation of blood is somehow hindered, or something else sending warning signals to our brain that something is wrong. Thus one gets alert and one cannot sleep.
If one has trouble sleeping over a long period, the heart muscle gets tired. A very dangerous situation likely to end in a stroke.
(Mind you, I am not a doctor.)
I had an uncle who died of stroke at age 28. Don't wait until you're thirty to get sleep. Not enough sleep has a few other bad effects, too, one of which is aging rapidly. Those people you see who are 40 and look 60? They smoke and don't get enough sleep.
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