Sleep and Mortality: A Population-Based 22-Year Follow-Up Study (2007)

The people that want to make criticisms about how this association is not causal can start reading halfway through the first column of page 1252. The authors are careful to phrase their finding as an association, not a causal relationship.<p>They discuss the confounds you might think of (sleep a lot because of undetected major illness? depression? etc) and their efforts at controlling for them.<p>They then acknowledge that there are still enough unknowns that they can&#x27;t make a causal link, and that there should be more in depth and controlled experiments to investigate this phenomenon.

Slightly tangential to the study here but I’ve been going down the sleep apnea rabbit hole in recent months and I strongly encourage folks to investigate their sleep. A lot of people have sleep apnea and don’t realize it. You don’t have to snore to have it. A surprising statistic I found was 20-30% of people with ADHD have sleep apnea. A lot of people may be treating symptoms of sleep apnea like ADHD and high blood pressure with medications while ignoring the root cause. My experience with this has been that doctors are surprisingly ignorant. They’ll happy prescribe you medications for anxiety, ADHD, blood pressure for years, and never think to ask you about your sleep. Do some of your own investigations or ask about it if you have any suspicions.

Results: long (&gt;8h) and short (&lt;7h) sleep both associated with greater risk of mortality.

To everyone requesting more, different studies: Okay, you&#x27;re correct in the philosophy-of-science sense. No doubt that feels good.<p>But, current understanding of biology is that:<p>- Literally no biological process is not affected by sleep<p>- Disrupting sleep disrupts whichever process is being studied<p>- Literally every type of organism sleeps[0]<p>It&#x27;s a <i>huge waste of time</i> further proving that sleep is really, really, important, and this waste of time is actively harmful to everyone. What&#x27;s maybe not a waste of time is researching<p>- How to actually get things into a shape where sleep is a priority on a population level<p>- Therapeutic interventions targeting poor sleep<p>- Otherwise preventing or mitigating poor sleep<p>[0] Sleep:<p>- Periodic<p>- Quiescent (less activity, less response to environmental stimuli)<p>- Homeostatic, e.g. sleep less now -&gt; sleep more later

What worries me more is the link between sleep and Alzehimer’s&#x2F;cognitive impairment.

I would prefer to see an experiment (even on non human mammals) rather than see a study that likely cannot disentangle correlation and causation.

I would love to see the results of a slightly different study where participants (usually) fell asleep and woke naturally (and without external influences like apartment neighbors or flatmates) and those who&#x27;s sleep cycle terminated artificially.

This is a repost from yesterday: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16267306" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=16267306</a>

&quot;Significantly increased risk of mortality&quot; sounds like the participants were immortal before..

(2007)