Stroke Risk Spikes In Healthy Adults Who Don't Get Enough Sleep 70
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."
Re:Damn (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
And why can't they sleep? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)