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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!
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.