

Study finds "unequivocal link" between lack of sleep and early death - swombat
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/may/05/sleep-study-premature-death

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sadiq
Link to the actual paper
[http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/staff/cappuccio/publicatio...](http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/staff/cappuccio/publications/sleep_2010_mortality_meta.pdf)

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swombat
Well, this should put the polyphasic sleep debate to rest.

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sadiq
From my reading, the research only looks at monophasic sleeping patterns and
so gives no real useful information on the effects of polyphasic sleep on
health.

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swombat
Agreed in principle, but in practice I think the argument goes as follows:

1) There is evidence that prolonged lack of sleep (6h/night or less) leads to
an early death

2) Many polyphasic sleep methods involve dramatically less sleep than 6h a
night

3) There is no implied correlation between those two statements, but a
cautious person who wants to maximise their chance of living as long as
possible would infer that:

\- Given the lack of data, it is probably a better idea to avoid polyphasic
sleep altogether until proper studies are conducted.

Previously, the argument was that there is no evidence linking lack of sleep
with death, therefore why not give polyphasic sleep a go. I think that
argument is not valid anymore.

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tome
Not necessarily. Perhaps it's staying awake for more than 18 hours
consecutively that causes early death.

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swombat
Read my comment more carefully. I didn't say there's conclusive evidence of a
link - just that a cautious individual who wants to maximise their lifespan
will probably assume that it's best to sleep 6-8 hours a night.

Edit: Of course, that's assuming the study results are actually correct, which
according to ajkirwin's comments, they're possibly not.

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ajkirwin
Having read the article and the abstract of the paper in question, it seems a
little.. off. For a start, it's a meta-analysis pulling from a simply massive
pool. And it asks people about areas of their life from a few years upto two
and a half decades.

Do YOU know how often you slept under six hours a night in the last year? 2
years? 5? 10?

Did all these people keep detailed sleep diaries every single night?

This just raises too many questions. Meta-analysis is most useful when
restricted to much smaller sample sizes where a greater amount of data can be
obtained and analyzed.

\-- Edit for More Info:

It seems that this paper is a meta-study of OTHER papers. And that 80% of the
data used came from a single study by Daniel F. Kripke of UCSD.

The conclusions of Kripke study, which were meta-analysed, were notably
different than Cappuccio's, namely:

"The best survival rates were found among those who slept 7 hours per night.
The study showed that a group sleeping 8 hours were 12 percent more likely to
die within the six-year period than those sleeping 7 hours, other factors
being equal. Even those with as little as 5 hours sleep lived longer than
participants with 8 hours or more per night."

