Monday, December 03, 2007

Get Your Sleep



Hope you've had a good night sleep and that you haven't been staying up late surfing on the internet or emailing. On average most adults need 7-8 hours of sleep. According to a recent study from London those of us who got too little or too much sleep are at a higher risk of death due to both cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular causes.

In this study, 10,000 participants between the ages of 30-55 were evaluated initially between 1985-1988 and again during 1992-1993. Those who had cut their sleeping from 7 hours to 5 hours or less faced a 1.7 fold increased risk in mortality from all causes, and twice the increased risk of death from cardiovascular causes. Those who slept more than 8 hours also had a higher risk of mortality from general causes but not from cardiovascular causes.

Resources: Sleepeducation.com. National Sleep Foundation.

Photo: courtesy of University of Vermont.

2 comments:

Nirmala Pather said...

Dear Doctor,

I found your article on sleep interesting as I too have written a similar article on sleep on my blog and website.www.qualitylivingstyles.com/sleep.html
There is also a link to my blog. I am not in the medical field but I was intrigued by the value of sleep and how and how just sleeping well can make a huge difference to our general health.

Alessandro Vernet said...

What is a "1.7 fold increased risk in mortality"? Does that mean that those people were 1.7 times more likely to die during the study?