51–60 of 116 posts
Preprint not peer reviewed. Also: ”A.J.K.P. and S.W.C. are co-founders and co-directors of Circadian Health Innovations PTY LTD.” Lemme guess, looking for funding.
What can we do about the tendency of research articles to get their big flash of publicity before undergoing peer review?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need to make it a lot cooler for researchers to not do original research all the time but to do replication and peer review. We should also demand publication of failures -- it's ok to fail, but only if you publish about the failure. The whole publish-or-perish culture is a disaster that incentivizes cheating. It should be considered just as valuable to have a few grad students working on replication as on origina…
> We need to make it a lot cooler for researchers to not do original research all the time but to do replication and peer review. This should be the work of grad students, not cranking out another paper or slaving for professors. > We should also demand publication of failures -- it's ok to fail, but only if you publish about the failure. I really want to have a journal that just publishes interesting duds. Someone e…
> This should be the work of grad students, not cranking out another paper or slaving for professors.
But the professors need to arrange for this.
Preprint not peer reviewed. Also: ”A.J.K.P. and S.W.C. are co-founders and co-directors of Circadian Health Innovations PTY LTD.” Lemme guess, looking for funding.
Peer review just checks for obvious errors in study design, asks for more info if needed, and decides whether the paper is a good fit for the journal.
Watson and Crick's paper describing the structure of DNA wasn't peer reviewed. if you think they're wrong, try it for yourself and publish the results.
When a few groups all get the same result then you can be confident about the claims made. until then, it's just kind of interesting to think about, which is fine.
> A.J.K.P. and S.W.C. are co-founders and co-directors of Circadian Health Innovations PTY LTD
I do agree that this paper alone should not be used to help sell a product. But it looks like this paper just confirms previous findings using more rigorous methodology (see background):
"Light at night causes circadian disruption, (21–23) and is therefore a potential determinant of cardiovascular disease risk. Higher risks for coronary artery disease (24) and stroke (25) have been observed in people living in urban environments with brighter outdoor night light, as measured by satellite. Brighter night light has been cross-sectionally related to atherosclerosis, (26,27) obesity, hypertension, and diabetes (28) in small but well-characterized cohorts, using bedroom (26,27) and wrist-worn (28) light sensors. Moreover, experimental exposure to night light elevates heart rate and alters sympathovagal balance. (29) However, current evidence linking night light with cardiovascular risk is mostly within small cohorts, or relies on geospatial-level measurements of outdoor lighting, rather than measures of personal light exposure. (30,31)"
Preprint not peer reviewed. Also: ”A.J.K.P. and S.W.C. are co-founders and co-directors of Circadian Health Innovations PTY LTD.” Lemme guess, looking for funding.
The best thing to do is to take commonly held knowledge and make a study out of it. Maybe the next study could be “live king cobra in the bed results in sleep reduction”. Probably a book and a TED talk to go with it.
You can almost see the grin as they wrote up the results.
Sorry for exposing my personal medical data, but... I literally cannot fall asleep without at least some light. So I sleep with lights on. Trying to be like normal people would only make my overall health worse. Is this a medical condition that has a name?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it doesn't make any difference. Back in Russia, I used 2700K or 3000K LEDs. Here in the Philippines, high-CRI warm-color LEDs are unobtainable, and the culture exhibits a nearly-universal shift to 6500K indoor lights (unlike in Europe), so I use 6500K, just like everyone else here. It still works.
6500k? Deliberately in the home?? Is this one of those things where some element is considered desirable in the Western world (e.g. warm white lighting) but is associated with destitution in another culture (because it’s like incandescent lighting)?
Preprint not peer reviewed. Also: ”A.J.K.P. and S.W.C. are co-founders and co-directors of Circadian Health Innovations PTY LTD.” Lemme guess, looking for funding.
Peer review doesn't tell you if the data is valid or not. they published their methodology and anyone is free to repeat the study. Peer review just checks for obvious errors in study design, asks for more info if needed, and decides whether the paper is a good fit for the journal. Watson and Crick's paper describing the structure of DNA wasn't peer reviewed. if you think they're wrong, try it for yourself and publish…
Sure but nobody claimed that.
> Watson and Crick's paper describing the structure of DNA wasn't peer reviewed.
I'd point out that outliers exist but that was before peer review become so popular.
Right now there's a good correlation between competency and peer review.
> if you think they're wrong, try it for yourself and publish the results.
Watson and Crick or the article?
For a balanced discussion of the article, it's reasonable to point out a lack of peer review to give context to what stage this is at. If "try it yourself" is the bar then I guess nobody comments? That doesn't seem like a good way to learn anything.
Several comments here mentioned shift work as a possible explanation. The paper concedes that shift work is unhealthy[1] but claims that shift work doesn't explain their finding[2]. And their conclusion is "avoiding night light may be a promising approach for preventing cardiovascular diseases," but without telling us why. It's going to be fascinating if there's a mechanism by which sleeping with light can cause hear…
I suspect everyone in the field already knows the top-level answer: light at night blunts the output of the circadian pacemaker (SCN), with all sorts of downstream effects including control of various hormones. So the levels will be different with light at night. "at night" means biological night. If someone consistently sleeps on some schedule with bright enough light during their awake time, and it's dark during their sleep time, it's fine.
I'm not in the field. I read up on it at one point at a shallow level and talked to some researchers about it informally.
How do they know the causal link? Can it be that people who stay up late sleep less and this causes issues, and there being light is only a consequence of staying up late?
There's more details further in the article[1].
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.06.20.25329961v...