Tired of endless health-scare stories? Me too
Whenever you see a mass-market newspaper article that begins ‘Doctors claim that’, it’s a good idea to switch off. Doctors (who seem these days to suffer from verbal incontinence) claim something or other every day. And giving their half-baked ‘conclusions’ to lazy hacks is the fast lane to clinical myths.
Today’s big medical horror story has inspired headlines around the world proclaiming that, if you only sleep a few hours, you’re more likely to die. First off, there’s no likelihood about death: it’s going to happen to all of us. Second, the research study itself has been woefully misreported. Even the Press Association this morning kicked off with this belter:
‘The research, reported in the journal Sleep, reviewed 16 prospective studies from the UK, US, Europe and Asia which together monitored more than 1.3 people for up to 25 years’.
Blimey: one and a third people got monitored for a quarter of a century. The number was actually in millions (easy typo to miss) but just using second-place maths shows that it was 1.4 million. Think I’m being picky? 56,360 people asleep is a stadium full of snoring. And this carelessness was, as it happens, a precursor of all the media coverage. Buried down towards the end of the PA release was a quote from the head of the study. Professor Francesco Cappucio, head of the Sleep, Health and Society Programme at the University of Warwick, said: “Whilst short sleep may represent a cause of ill-health, long sleep is believed to represent more an indicator of ill-health…”
Or…..short sleep causes ill-health, and long sleep is a symptom of ill-health. This is actually a major and important finding. You just won’t find that anywhere in the media reporting about it. But what you will find is that the original article concludes:
‘Both short and long duration of sleep are significant predictors of death in prospective population studies.’
“‘Short and long’ doesn’t fit” is probably what the subed said. The point is, only needing a short amount of sleep at night doesn’t mean you’re heading for early death. Two years earlier – in
May 2008 – Dr Cappucio said that the study showed
‘a consistent pattern of increased likelihood of being a short sleeper for people who are obese, both children and adults’.
Or….if short sleep is a predictor of early death, it is itself a symptom of obesity….which is also a predictor of early death. The real heads-up on these findings is ‘If you’re fat you will sleep badly and die early’. Even less chance of that one fitting I’m afraid – but a lot nearer the likely truth of all this nonsense.
So if you’re a shorter sleeper than most, don’t lose any sleep about it: just lose some weight.
The Slog 