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Prolonged Sitting and Poor Sleep Can Work Together To Shorten Your Life (latimes.com)
schwit1 sends word that a new study published in PLOS Medicine has examined how lifestyle risk factors can affect mortality rates, both alone and in combination with each other. Having a single major risk factor increased mortality rates slightly, but the study found that those who report multiple risk factors are significantly more likely to die early. While this includes obvious behavior like smoking and alcohol consumption, the findings also suggest prolonged sitting and unhealthy sleep patterns can strongly increase mortality rates when combined with each other, or with the obvious behaviors. "Some combinations were more deadly than others, the researchers found. Those who blended insufficient exercise with prolonged sitting were 2.42 times more likely to die during the study, and those who were also guilty of sleeping for too many hours were 4.23 times more likely die by the time the study ended. 'These findings suggest there is a "synergistic effect" among risk factors,' the study authors wrote."
The medical profession has a problem understanding the difference between correlation and causation, and this is just one example of it.
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I probably won't even make it to the end of this post.
On the other han
I love that a story about how poor sleep habits and sitting too long can kill you was posted at 2:15 AM. Those of us sitting around unable to sleep now have our apparently imminent mortality to think about, too.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
No, RTFA, too much sleep (more than nine hours) is seen as unhealthy too.
Or maybe sick people sleep a lot. It is likely the causation is the other way around. While TFA is quick to say that the sleeping causes the deaths, the study itself only says they are "associated".
Mortality is higher among slashdot users with a low user id. Makes you think doesn't it?
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Of all participants, 31.2%, 36.9%, 21.4%, and 10.6% reported 0, 1, 2, and 3+ risk factors, respectively. There was a strong relationship between the lifestyle risk index score and all-cause mortality.
31.2+36.9+21.4+10.6= everyone and 1% extras. Did significant significance creep in?
Out of all 96 possible risk combinations, the 30 most commonly occurring combinations accounted for more than 90% of the participants.
Each of 7 factors can be one of two states. That is 2^7 except that two of the conditions are "too much" or "too little" sleep which means a those state can be reduced to one. 2^6 isn't 96 as far as I know.
If you're an American worker slaving away in a cubicle to make rich assholes even richer, life sucks anyway. Why prolong it?
Those rich assholes sit in their office all day long and never get up except for lunch and they sleep in every day because they are the boss.. I think we are about to learn an important lesson here... in 4... 3....2....1.... Promotion!
Some obvious workarounds...
"2.42 times more likely to die during the study"
These people can avoid dying during the study by not participating in the study.
"4.23 times more likely die by the time the study ended"
These people could be saved by continuing the study indefinitely.
Problems solved!
No, RTFA, too much sleep (more than nine hours) is seen as unhealthy too.
Or maybe sick people sleep a lot. It is likely the causation is the other way around. While TFA is quick to say that the sleeping causes the deaths, the study itself only says they are "associated".
Actually, the STUDY explicitly says exactly what you just did about causation. From the Discussion section:
It is biologically plausible that short sleep duration may increase mortality risk through adverse endocrinologic, immunologic, and metabolic effects [48,49,50] or through chronic inflammation [47,51,52]. The mechanism for the association between long sleep duration and mortality is not well understood [17,47]. Most studies suggest that long sleep duration tends to be associated with sleep fragmentation, fatigue, depression, and underlying disease and poor health [53]. Therefore, the observed association between long sleep duration and all-cause mortality could be due to "reverse causality" or residual confounding [17,54]. An interesting observation from the current study is that risk combinations involving long sleep duration, prolonged sitting, and/or physical inactivity tended to be among those with the strongest associations with mortality, with HRs ranging from 2 to above 4. These associations remained significant and of similar magnitude after excluding deaths within the first 2 y of follow-up (S2 Table). This may suggest that the underlying characteristics associated with such behavioral patterns involving long sleep, sedentariness, and inactivity, perhaps not limited to major occult disease or failing health, may have contributed to the elevated risk for morality.
And they also note a few other things, like the fact that the "long sleep" problem tends to be a better marker for bad things with older people. This study didn't control for the fact that older people tend to sleep less or at least have trouble sleeping in longer blocks (compared to younger people). So it makes some intuitive sense that when you have an older person who also sleeps really long, it may be associated with some other problem (depression, disease, etc.), which is more likely to lead to a greater mortality.
.....I'm royally fucked. 12-15hr shifts mostly sat on my arse driving or waiting, 6hrs a day of broken sleep and to top it off I work nights as well. Already got a fucked back and am overweight, both of which are very common in the job. On the bright side at least I'll be dead long before my medical care gets really expensive.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
So that's what those places look like. I could not help but think of rowers that powered Roman Empire naval vessels the way these people are lined up in rows and columns. Battle speed!
mfwright@batnet.com