Prolonged Sitting and Poor Sleep Can Work Together To Shorten Your Life (latimes.com) 115
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."
Re:Sleeping too FEW hours (Score:4, Insightful)
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".
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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".
I sit myself when I read the study.
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Re:Sleeping too FEW hours (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Sigh. Mod this one up, and the previous ones down please.
"Hey, I know about sleep and sitting, I don't need to RTFA... I'll assume it's a correlation /= causation fallacy and get frist pots!"
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"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 grea
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While TFA is quick to say that the sleeping causes the deaths, the study itself only says they are "associated".
Fact: Breathing causes death. Proof: 100% of all dead people were habitual breathers.
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However, about 7% of all human breathers have not died. That means that the death connection isn't statistically significant by the usual standards.
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I would conjecture that sleep slooowsss down circulation, and aids in clogging arteries. And the slowing down lowers blood pressure, allowing arteries to contract. These two cumulative actions take place over many years
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Enuf! (Score:1)
I'm sick and tired of people telling me not to get sick and tired!
Correlation != causation (Score:3, Insightful)
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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A Whopper with cheese is 730 calories. Add a "medium" fry @ 410 and a "medium" Coke @ 290 and the value meal weighs in at 1430 Kcal. That's one meal.
https://www.bk.com/pdfs/nutrit... [bk.com]
Never mind snacks (Doritos are 140 Kcal/oz, a 12 oz bag is easily eaten in one mindless eating session in front of the TV), 1680 Kcal, along with beer, soda or some other sweet stuff.
And if you go out to a "real sit-down" restaurant, the sky's the limit. Mexican food is especially calorie laden, and most places have huge portion
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You're assuming someone is going to try to eat "the right foods."
Re:Correlation != causation (Score:5, Insightful)
By the same token, you don't get fat by eating too much - you eat too much because being fat makes you do it, right? It is correct that correlation is not proof of causation; but it narrows the choices down - correlation means things are connected, one way or the other. Either one causes the other, or they share a root cause. Which one you decide to go with is up to your own judgement - considering what we already know about things like the harmful effects of stress and the benefits of exercise, I would say it is more plausible that avoiding sitting down is better for your health, and that getting a good night's sleep is essential in avoiding stress - the reason for the latter being that if you feel tired due to lack of sleep, you are less able to cope with problems (which makes you feel stressed out) and you try to compensate by eating energy rich food (=too many calories, especially sugar) and drinking beverages with caffeine, which tend to ruin your sleep.
Could there be causation in the opposite direction? No doubt - but I think it mostly goes the other way.
Re:Correlation != causation (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, fat is implicated in increased hunger by numerous studies.
" Scientists from the Lawson Health Research Institute (part of the University of Western Ontario) believe that they have found the reason that people with extra belly fat are hungrier than others. According to their study published in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), fat cells around the abdomen produce an appetite-inducing hormone known as Neuropeptide Y (NPY)."
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I must be the exception then, because I'm losing weight on a calorie restrictive diet and aggressive exercise program. I've found that, at some points in the day I get a little hungry, but for the most part even though I'm usually eating well under 1500 kcal a day I'm just not feeling hungry. I'm eating a lot of green vegetables and drinking water, and once I get myself moving on a jog or bike ride my appetite seems to just dry up.
It probably helps that I've been in relatively good shape for most of my life
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Actually...
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... [sciencedaily.com]
Moderate exercise reduces appetite.
"A vigorous 60-minute workout on a treadmill affects the release of two key appetite hormones, ghrelin and peptide YY, while 90 minutes of weight lifting affects the level of only ghrelin, according to a new study. Taken together, the research shows that aerobic exercise is better at suppressing appetite than non-aerobic exercise and provides a possible explanation for how that happens."
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That is probably true, but note that fat in the body is NOT the same thing as fat in the diet. (This is the fallacy that's led to decades of bad nutritional advice, leading to an increase in the very problems it was trying to solve.)
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Nope. Sometimes it's just down to coincidence.
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Sometimes it's just down to coincidence
Sometimes - but pure coincidence, or chance, is not likely to be persistent. It's like rolling dice: you may get a series of sexes, but if it goes on indefinitely, then the suspicion must be that there is something dodgy going on.
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Sometimes - but pure coincidence, or chance, is not likely to be persistent. It's like rolling dice: you may get a series of sexes, but if it goes on indefinitely, then the suspicion must be that there is something dodgy going on.
You know, if I roll dice and get a series of sexes I'm going to conclude something dodgy is going on right there - no need for persistence.
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cravings, blood sugar, hormones, biological stressors, emotional stressors, diet (high fat, low fat, carb)
complex problems = hard solutions, but thanks for playing
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Yeah, the first thing I thought was, "Well, maybe the more unhappy your life is, the more of these kinds of behaviors you're likely to engage in."
If you find that A and B are correlated, you have to ask if A caused B, or B caused A, or if there's a third thing C, which is causing both B and A. Either being chronically unhappy, or being ill, are things which could both
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By randomized, controlled studies.
Re:Correlation != causation (Score:4, Interesting)
You beat me to it.
Citation needed.
http://www.healthnewsreview.or... [healthnewsreview.org]
"Frequent fish consumption was associated with a 50% reduction in the relative risk of dying from a heart attack." Her editor's reaction? Slash. Too wordy, too passive. The editor's rewrite? "Women who ate fish five times a week cut their risk of dying later from a heart attack by half."
https://www.elsevier.com/conne... [elsevier.com]
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This is what happens when you adapt computerized records in medical practice using more money than brains, as we do here in the U.S.
You quickly get huge databases of patients. Any medical resident looking for a cheap, easy journal publication can take a medical record database, run some standard statistical packages, and spit out correlations at p LT 0.05. https://xkcd.com/882/ [xkcd.com]
Then they say, "Our statistical software https://blog.stackoverflow.com... [stackoverflow.com] corrected for cigarette smoking and every other known fac
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This is the kind of thing that makes many people to be skeptical of "scientific" findings, or when people claim "the science is settled".
Please don't take that as an opportunity to jump on my comment as if I'm a "denier". I'm not. But, I have lost some faith in peer review because many experimental claims seem to be getting taken as fact without further verification. Repeatable results matter, but nobody gets funded to recreate results because there's no glory in it.
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Experimental claims are taken as fact by who? Usually, what I see is a headline about a scientific study, with no link to the actual papers, and no follow-up through a citations index. It seems to me that many people's problems with scientists actually have problems with journalism.
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Took two seconds to google these. I'm not alone on this.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... [nih.gov]
http://www.wsj.com/articles/ha... [wsj.com]
http://www.economist.com/news/... [economist.com]
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/21s... [columbia.edu]
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I glanced at the first two links, which referred to peer review problems causing problems for scientists. That doesn't mean scientists take the papers as fact; if they're reading those articles they'll be even more reluctant.
Science isn't just peer-reviewed papers. Some of those papers are going to be wrong, and some experiments will wind up not meaning what people thought at the time. This is known, although it would appear that it's getting worse. Citation indexes are great for following up on thos
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People sleeping too long probably have an underlying condition. People sleeping too little probably have an alarm clock and a screwed up work-life balance.
As for exercise, they may have an underlying condition or it may be that work-life balance thing again.
Modern lifestyles promote this (Score:1)
We say that excessive sitting is unhealthy. However, modern lifestyles encourage excessive sitting, despite its dangers. Some say it's as bad as smoking. However, we spend eight or nine hours each weekday at work, and the high paying jobs tend to involve lots of sitting. We also spend lots of time in commute, perhaps 30-45 minutes each way, sitting in a car stuck in traffic. It's really easy to spend ten or more hours per day sitting. While I understand that sustaining our modern way of life requires more u
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People also waste a lot of time at the office and call it working.
If this is true, I'm in trouble (Score:5, Funny)
I probably won't even make it to the end of this post.
On the other han
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Yep... I'm doomed.
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RIP, Maow. :(
Yes convenient for employers (Score:1)
Keep them sleep deprived and standing. It's for their own good.
Baloney.
Great Timing (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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...posted at 2:15 AM.
Timezones? When I look at this article, I see 7:15 as the timestamp.
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I'm assuming EST, since I see 2:15AM as well.
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I thought that 08:15 was the time that it's always been.
Lyric from Enola Gay by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, for those too young to know it
Living underground & absence of sunlight (Score:1)
If living underground and never getting any sunlight are detrimental too I'd be surprised if I make it to the end of the;lksdgne poigjuofdjs;l;dlkmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Also consider this... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Also consider this... (Score:5, Funny)
And birthdays are good for you - the more you have the longer you live
After reading the article (Score:1)
Lack or too much sleep might be result of hormonal or metabolic problems, also the result of breathing issues due to congenital defects or too much height.
So, although some variable aren't perfect they can me measured and tracked, while deeper and more
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Yes, but as the contributor above pointed out, correlation != causation.
We've had too many false positives from the Nurses' Health Study to ignore that.
People who are sick in the first place are likely to be more sedentary and to have difficulty sleeping.
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But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.
Also, we don't have the abstract of the article, or the introduction to the survey questionnaire, but it is possible that there is a health condition field.
Like a health status, or if the person has a previous condition or another health issue.
So it logical to assume that there was some tracking on that.
Plus, you can be "healthy" and not know that you have a congenital or genetic cond
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Actually, we do have the abstract and the entire article. PLOS Medicine is open source. http://journals.plos.org/plosm... [plos.org] I think you can even follow the links to the original questionnaire.
There's a pretty strong consensus among epidemiologists, including the ones who gave the talk I linked to https://www.elsevier.com/conne... [elsevier.com] , that you can't infer causation from association.
But any statistical study worth their salt will check the data for bias and other effects.
Yes, they'll check, but without a randomized, controlled trial, it's impossible to rule out bias and other effects.
Re: After reading the article (Score:1)
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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!
Am I bad at sums? (Score:2)
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.
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No, of the 7, those 2 conditions can be reduced to a triplet not a 6th binary pair. That leaves 5 binary pairs and the triplet.
so 2^5*3=96
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Based on your comment, I'm guessing they are assuming self reporting for both over-sleeping and under-sleeping?
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What does A have to do with B?
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How can you both over sleep and under sleep? And how can you ask that in a survey or get it from other data in a reliable way? I know this can be true but I expect about as many correct answers on a self survey to a question like that as "what color is the last unicorn horn you saw?"
There are people who both under sleep and over sleep but they are very rare and I expect they would be hesitant to answer the question correctly. That doesn't even deal with the issues of having them dropped from the pool of
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You can't both over and under. Thus we have 5 binary conditions:
2^5=32
and the "other" two conditions, Over and Under. That's the 7.
But over and under are conditional conditions, only one can exist at a time (or neither). Thus they are, together, a triplet.
So 2^5=32*3=96
Some obvious workarounds... (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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scientific observation has been strongly correlated to cancer in laboratory rats
Yep (Score:1)
Duh (Score:2)
"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."
Wow, how insightful.
In other news, scientists found that being shot in the chest once increased mortality rates slightly, but those who are shot in the chest multiple times "are significantly more likely to die early."
Code fast, die young, leave a pale bloated corpse (Score:2)
As a trucker.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Plus with all that driving, there's a good chance you'll get into an accident.
Hooray! (Score:1)
Risky Study (Score:2)
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.
Sounds like participating in the study was pretty risky behavior as well.
Well... shit... (Score:2)
Photo of actual call center! (Score:3)
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Email to all employees (Score:2)
Just got this, hope I don't die before this January's presentation:
Sleep and Performance Sleep is an integral part of life that is often bartered in exchange for spending more time on all other aspects of life. However, studies have shown that inadequate sleep actually has a negative impact on both health and performance. Understanding the physiologic drive for sleep, the effects of fatigue, and how to optimize sleep will provide the participants with strategies to boost performance and reduce fatigue-rel
Chris Rock (Score:1)