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Apparently, sleep is now bad for you. In fact, too much of it will kill you.
Or so says the results of a six-year long study of more than a million adults, coincidentally conducted by psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of UCSD (I did not even know we had a psychiatry major). Someone who sleeps an average of 6-7 hours a night supposedly will have a lower death rate than a person who sleeps an average of 8 hours a night.
Now, being the scientific-minded, sleep-loving person that I am, my first instinct is to immediately question the validity of such an experiment. I mean, using people in an experiment is hard enough to control. But using over a million people?! There is just a staggering amount of variability there, with no way to control for it. The differences in sleep could be due to a number of reasons: emotional state, physical state, age, sex, and everything else that is different from one person to another. All this experiment really proves is that there is a link between people who sleep slightly less and a lower mortality rate. Which really amounts to nothing.
Think about it. If a person that normally slept 8 hours a night read this study and decided to sleep an hour or two less a night, would that person automatically reduce their mortality rate? Probably not. I am more inclined to believe that the chance of that person dying has more to do with their emotional and physical health, but maybe that's just me. But you know what? THAT might actually be a worthwhile experiment to carry out. THIS experiment does not prove anything except to be an atrocious waste of time and my tuition money.
Apparently, sleep is now bad for you. In fact, too much of it will kill you.
Or so says the results of a six-year long study of more than a million adults, coincidentally conducted by psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of UCSD (I did not even know we had a psychiatry major). Someone who sleeps an average of 6-7 hours a night supposedly will have a lower death rate than a person who sleeps an average of 8 hours a night.
Now, being the scientific-minded, sleep-loving person that I am, my first instinct is to immediately question the validity of such an experiment. I mean, using people in an experiment is hard enough to control. But using over a million people?! There is just a staggering amount of variability there, with no way to control for it. The differences in sleep could be due to a number of reasons: emotional state, physical state, age, sex, and everything else that is different from one person to another. All this experiment really proves is that there is a link between people who sleep slightly less and a lower mortality rate. Which really amounts to nothing.
Think about it. If a person that normally slept 8 hours a night read this study and decided to sleep an hour or two less a night, would that person automatically reduce their mortality rate? Probably not. I am more inclined to believe that the chance of that person dying has more to do with their emotional and physical health, but maybe that's just me. But you know what? THAT might actually be a worthwhile experiment to carry out. THIS experiment does not prove anything except to be an atrocious waste of time and my tuition money.
4 Comments:
found you in google blogsearch. completely disagree with you on kripke. read over more of his stuff beyond that, and technically it wasnt an experiment, it was just a big analysis of a longitudinal dataset. i agree that the mortality thing is a big leap, but i think he throws that in there to show the absurdity of the drug co proposition that you need 8hr a night no matter what.
If it really was a study of statistical data as you stated, then that makes his conclusions even more suspect. Statistical data can easily be manipulated to prove whatever you want it to prove. And even if his conclusions were sound, my original point still stands: his conclusions really amount to nothing.
I might agree with the claim that sleep drugs do more harm than good, but most people that take those drugs aren't even getting 6-7 hours of sleep a night. And even if they do take the drugs, there is no guarantee that they will sleep for 8 hours anyway, so Kripke's study is irrelevant to most people who take sleep drugs.
And as for his conspiracy theory about drug companies, that may or may not be true, but again, I don't think it's relevant. Most people that take the drugs would probably be happy getting a continuous 6 hours of sleep. And I remember reading something in a psyc class that 8 hours is how much children should sleep, but 6 hours is sufficient for adults.
yeha they certainly can make data say anything, and i generally share your skepticism. the point is that if his conclusions mean nothing, then neither does the stuff the drug cos say since they use the same methods. that puts us back at square one. and if you agree that 6hr is sufficient for adults the you agree with him, since the 8hr myth is what he is trying to fight against. also psychiatry is a specialty for MDs, so he is in your med school.
I did a study about why Ramen is delicious. Your welcome Scientific Community.
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