“Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1795
Much beloved is sleep. Much studied, too. Practically to death, it seems.
On Tuesday, the latest scientific findings about sleep were reported on the “Top of the News” page in the Star, page A3.
“Amount of sleep linked to heart disease,” a headline said. “Too much, too little raises risk.”
According to Associated Press, researchers said women who averaged five hours or less of sleep a night were 39 per cent more likely to develop heart disease than eight-hour sleepers.
At the other end of the scale, women who averaged nine or more hours of shut-eye were 37 per cent more likely to develop blocked arteries.
Although the scary story didn’t say so, a summary on the Archives of Internal Medicine Web site said short and long sleepers alike face a “modestly increased risk of coronary events.”
Enter Stephen Watson of Markham, a gimlet-eyed reader with a long memory (and many newspaper clippings).
“I love reading the Star,” he says, “but one thing that bothers me is the way medical stories are published that contradict previous articles but provide no context for the discrepancies.”
In short, Watson wants more background in research stories. “Many people sleep less than eight hours,” he said. “If this article was the first your readers have seen on sleep studies, it could create unnecessary confusion or anxiety.”
To prove the point, Watson noted the Star reported last Feb. 15 that people who sleep only five to seven hours live longer than those who sleep eight hours or more a night.
How does that square with the worrisome “new” news of increased risk of heart disease for short-term sleepers?
In the year-old story, Dr. Daniel Kripke, a psychiatry professor from California, said folks who sleep seven hours or less “have nothing to worry about. There is no evidence that people need eight hours of sleep. That’s just what Grandma used to teach, without any scientific basis.”
Kripke (an eight-hour man) was discussing his just-published, 1980s sleep study of 1.1 million Americans.
It found the best survival rates among those who slumbered seven hours a night. “Those sleeping eight hours about 38 per cent were 12 per cent more likely than the first group to die within six years,” the Star reported.
Reader Watson pulled out another story from last March. Headline: “The perils of too little shut-eye Less than 8 hours’ sleep a night linked to accidents, illness, even early death.”
The story exposing the ills of a “sleep-deprived society” was short on statistics but flatly declared: “A shortage of sleep may raise breast-cancer risk.”
It quoted Dr. Tom Roth, chief of the Sleep Disorders and Research Centre in Detroit, on the lack of knowledge about sleep and possibly “grave” consequences of sleep deprivation.
But Roth didn’t line up with the “sleep-less-die-sooner” camp. He said life-threatening illnesses like heart disease might make it harder to get needed sleep. In other words heart disease, not lack of sleep, is the problem.
Reader Watson, a skeptical layman when it comes to interpreting medical research, plucked yet another Star story from his files, dated 1999.
“You need as many (hours of sleep) as you need,” it quoted a sleep expert who added there’s no magic number.
Watson’s main point is that this week’s story about sleep and heart disease was short on context.
His prescription? “Your medical reporters could take the findings of individual studies (not just on sleep) and fit them into the overall context as I do when I cite contradictory research.”
Hard to disagree with that.
