Six To Eight Hours of Sleep Best For the Heart, Says Study (theguardian.com) 71
Research shows sleep deprivation or excessive hours in bed increase risk of coronary artery disease or stroke. From a report: Six to eight hours of sleep a night is most beneficial for the heart, while more or less than that could increase the risk of coronary artery disease or a stroke, researchers have suggested. The study, presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich, indicates sleep deprivation and excessive hours in bed should be avoided for optimum heart health. The study's author, Dr Epameinondas Fountas of the Onassis cardiac surgery centre in Athens, said: "Our findings suggest that too much or too little sleep may be bad for the heart. More research is needed to clarify exactly why, but we do know that sleep influences biological processes like glucose metabolism, blood pressure, and inflammations -- all of which have an impact on cardiovascular disease." Data from more than a million adults from 11 studies was analysed as part of the research. Compared with adults who got six to eight hours of sleep a night, "short sleepers" had an 11% greater risk, while "long sleepers" had 33% increased risk over the next nine years.
If you don't sleep enough... (Score:5, Funny)
Six To Eight Hours of Sleep Best For the Heart (Score:2)
Better shorter than longer (Score:4, Funny)
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what if the heavy sleepers have better and more wet dreams
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that's what the starched spot in the shorts is for
What if ... (Score:2)
What if you sleep standing upright ?
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You die. Horribly.
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Split the difference. Sleep seated.
t.busdriver
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What if you sleep standing upright ?
Then you're Mr. Ed, the stable genius.
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Then your a member of the US Marine Corps (at least from my experience in bootcamp)
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What if you sleep standing upright ?
In times gone by, poor itinerant workers and homeless people did that. Ropes were slung across rooms (stables and cellars generally) and people slumped over them for the night. Hence the expression "I am so tired I could sleep on a clothes line" :- Seen here [pressassociation.io]
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Never saw this before or even imagined it to have existed. Thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_penny_coffin [wikipedia.org]
Correlation =/= Causation. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Correlation =/= Causation. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, I bet the researchers never thought of that.
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It is just a "meta study", grabbing other people's real work and aggregating it. I do not see any effort to go beyond correlation.
Cobbled together because of the pressure to publish, and make conference presentations.
The article, and others googled, are very thin on detail.
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Sure they thought about that. And then went ahead regardless, for several reason, some of them even good ones. One that comes to mind is that just knowing it as a symptom can be useful for diagnosis. But the point stands, to prove causation you'd have to make a very different kind of study. The problem with this pseudo-news snippets is that people assumes that they should change their sleep patterns, creating possibly more harm than good in the process.
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unhealthy habits like a crappy job, that has you work 12 hours then be on call - repeat, exercise won't help much with that.
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How easy it is to get up in the morning is a function of a few things. One is how rested you are generally, but another is just the time of day that you're sleeping. A night owl is not likely to ever wake up early in the morning consistently no matter how early they go to bed, the body temperature in the morning is just going to be too low.
I'm personally a dedicated night owl and it takes a tremendous amount of discipline to get in bed and asleep before midnight, and even when I do, I have to artificially r
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Long Sleepers (Score:1)
Could the risks associated with excessive sleep be caused by other factors? For example, somebody who sleeps excessively likely doesn't have a job. The perpetually unemployed tend to have no discipline, don't exercise, are more likely to drink and smoke, and eat poor diets even though healthier food is cheaper. These factors would obviously lead to a much greater chance of coronary artery disease or a stroke.
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You change the pressure conditions on the heart. The human heart has four chambers - two to push arterial blood through the body, two to pull venous blood from the body. Fail to move around enough and you end up with some chambers growing too much muscle and enlarging, while the other chambers will lose strength. Usually this means that the arterial side of the heart gets larger so blood is pushed at higher pressure through the body while not being pulled back up from the legs, leading to swelling and other
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Try getting healthy food prepared for you ...... We have a long way to go.
You have a long way to go, not me.
Why not go back to the sleep schedule (Score:5, Funny)
of the middle ages? They lacked bright artificial light so they would naturally fall asleep early, not blasting their eyes with 100 watt incandescent or equivalent or computer screens with blue light. Then they'd sleep for about four hours, wake up for a few hours and spend that time praying, reading, helping bring in another brother or sister for their children, keeping watch over the fort, invading the neighbors, etc. Then they'd fall asleep again for another four or so hours.
Natural. Healthy. Refreshing. What happened to it? Are we losing our culture and history?
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A bit long winded, but right on the money. I doubt the researchers could tell if the people in the study slept in 2 blocks - all the studies they examined were asking about total number of hours, but not if they were contiguous.
A rare event, but I'm asking: Please mod this AC up.
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Read Matthew Walkers book on sleep. He specifically talks about this sleeping pattern in the Victorians. In short, it was a social construct and is not biologically natural, nor is it good for you. Humans are biologically programmed to sleep about 8 hours at night and about 1 hour in the early afternoon.
Re:Why not go back to the sleep schedule (Score:4, Interesting)
of the middle ages? They lacked bright artificial light so they would naturally fall asleep early, not blasting their eyes with 100 watt incandescent or equivalent or computer screens with blue light. Then they'd sleep for about four hours, wake up for a few hours and spend that time praying, reading, helping bring in another brother or sister for their children, keeping watch over the fort, invading the neighbors, etc. Then they'd fall asleep again for another four or so hours.
Natural. Healthy. Refreshing. What happened to it? Are we losing our culture and history?
I question your logic. Wasn't the average life expectancy during that period about 30 years?
Edit: No, I was wrong. 31.3 years.
This plan sounds neither healthy or refreshing!
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Average life expectancy was low mainly due to infant mortality and common infections.
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If you adjust for childhood mortality due to conditions that are now treatable, but weren't back then, you wind up with a figure that's much closer to the current than it was back then.
The main reason that the life expectancy was that low was that childhood mortality rates were sky high compared with now, as were pregnancy related deaths and death due to accident.
People tended to be healthy throughout what life they had and when they did fall ill, they tended to die much more quickly, none of that hanging o
Re: Why not go back to the sleep schedule (Score:2)
As someone else mentions, infant mortality plays a huge part in that average. But that aside, your own logic is flawed: just because people were dying younger doesn't mean they weren't sleeping better. Indeed, it could be that they were sleeping worse than us, but you certainly can't draw any conclusions based on a single, inherently misleading number like average life expectancy.
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How do they calculate the Life Expectancy? Is it an average? With lots of babies and kids dying pulling the average age down. It could be then that most adults would then live until about 50. I'd be interested in seeing an age distribution of the deceased in calculating this number.
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Life expectancy was so low due to very high baby/infant mortality at the time.
Statistics are tricky.
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I did that on my last job. The bus service was so unreliable that even if I left work at 5.30pm to catch the 5.45pm bus, there was no guarantee that it would arrive, since it was on a 2 hour schedule (suburban city had stretched services to the limit). So that involved a walk down to another bus stop, for another inter-city bus service by a private company. That bus would only complete the whole route if more than five people were on it by the time it left the bypass of the departing major city. That was on
Holy shit (Score:3)
A normal amount of sleep is good for you. Who could have guessed?
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That's a bit too strong. People who happen to sleep a normal amount, also happen to have fewer heart problems. The real cause could be something else.
checks out (Score:1)
4 hours is all you need (Score:1)
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I went to rural India and everyone spends 4 hours of sleep max .... vibrant and beaming with energy, never sick.
I'm glad to hear it. So can we stop trying to feel sorry and guilty about Indians? - I've been finding it an effort for a while now.
Orly!? (Score:1)
In related news (Score:2)
huh? (Score:2)
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