Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

academic.oup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 262 posts

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#231

Post by nerdponx »

Calavar wrote: post #13

> We aimed to assess the relationship of objectively measured sleep regularity with risk for all-cause mortality, and mortality from cardiometabolic causes and cancer, in a large cohort (N = 60 977) who wore accelerometer devices for 1 week. They look at one week of sleep data and then check mortality records about 10 to 15 years later. It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death pot…

I would expect that P(bad sleep this week | bad sleep chronically) > P(bad sleep this week | not bad sleep chronically). It's a question of inferential power: what is the minimum detectable effect size with such an indirect measurement?

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#232

Post by neom »

mklepaczewski wrote: post #221
neom wrote: post #2

Interesting, I have a DEC2 mutation and don't need much sleep, but I do sleep very consistently. When I was first working through this discovery, I asked the dr how it was that people who have this have no adverse effects when folks always say not sleeping long enough is bad for your health and he said "well, we don't really know that's true" and kinda shrugged it off.

Do you work out? How often, how long and what type of exercises do you do?

5 days a week, Velodrome 1 hour high intensity. 49/14 + :30 each way to work. I'm tall and skinny.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#233

Post by TZubiri »

lanstin wrote: post #148
TZubiri wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between panaceas and this is that the idea for extending life isn't to add something, but not to fuck an essential part of life. If you think of life as the careful coordination of millions of parts, then there will be a million of things that if you fuck up you will die.

Which is the model that matches acceleration of death rates as we age.

The reduction of death rates which is not due to panaceas but to fixing specific causes of death, one by one, yes.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#234

Post by TZubiri »

Calavar wrote: post #128
TZubiri wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Obviously there's an implication that people with terrible sleep regularity in that one week snapshot had terrible sleep regularity chronically, which in turn had a causative effect on mortality" You got it. "but we have to make a couple of deductive jumps to get to that conclusion" This is always the case unless you assume reality is as big as what you can perceive. "I'd really like to see the same study with longe…

Every deductive leap comes with uncertainty in establishing a causal chain. I don't I'm being overly reductive about the nature of evidence when I say that. There is a specific question that needs to be addressed: With a one week window into sleep habits, are we selecting for people who are chronically poor sleepers, with those poor sleep habits leading to disease? OR Are we selecting for people who are chronically i…

Too much word. Sleep good, regular sleep good. No more think, more do.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#235

Post by sfink »

kitchi wrote: post #151
styyyaaa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Any statistics buffs here who can tell me: Is 500k brits for 1 week as good as 5k brits for 100 weeks. Effectively with so much data aren't you getting a superposition anyway.

A superposition of? In statistical mechanics there's a concept of "ensemble average" and its provable that if you have a system, the average state of the system over say a 100 realisations ("ensemble average") run for 1 second each, is equal to the the average of one system run for a 100 seconds - under some assumptions of course. I don't know enough a about human biology to make a statement about whether any of thos…

That's not the scenario here. An ensemble average requires those 1 second periods to be randomly sampled from the overall runtime. You can't just measure the first second after starting for all samples, or even the 7th second after starting, and say anything statistically sound about the average of the whole runtime.

The weeks that were measured in this study were not random. How far from random is the big question.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#236

Post by Izkata »

snvzz wrote: post #97
thimabi wrote: post #87

I found the best way to ensure sleep regularity is by having a fixed wake-up time. If you don’t have one and you begin to set your alarm clock to early hours, the first weeks doing so will feel like hell. But eventually all will be worth it. The sleepiness during the day will disappear and, at night, your body will naturally want to get some rest early. Another strategy is to fill your day with deep work and exercise…

I do a version of this where what I have is a fixed wake-up time WINDOW. The window is 90m, to account for 90m sleep cycle. I set the alarm to whichever multiple of 90 falls within the wake up window. As a result, I sleep somewhere with 7h to 7h30 consistently, with the odd ~6h sleep day or ~9h in special circumstances (being sick).

There's an Android app called "Sleep" where you set an alarm window and put your phone on the corner of your bed, and the alarm only goes off when it detects you're a little active already and not in deep sleep (using the accelerometer to detect movement). If it doesn't detect enough activity it'll go off regardless at the end of the window.

It has a bunch of other features as well (rating how well you slept and detecting patterns to give advice, a snore detector, etc) but that alarm is the one I use it for.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#237

Post by devmor »

CardenB wrote: post #76
devmor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes. If you survive long enough to make sure your kid reaches maturity, that's all that matters there. Evolution can't select for anything that happens significantly past the birth of your progeny.

long enough to pass on genes also includes living long enough to make sure your child survives, so there is that as well.

Yes, which is why I said that.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#238

Post by devmor »

rgrieselhuber wrote: post #122
devmor wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as evolution is concerned, you've already had the kid - you passed on your genes. If you survive long enough to make sure your kid reaches maturity, that's all that matters there. Evolution can't select for anything that happens significantly past the birth of your progeny.

Sure it can. Knowledge, skills, and wisdom passed on to children and grandchildren well into adulthood significantly increases their chances of successfully passing on their genes to future generations, attract quality mates, and reduce stressors that can be passed down through subsequent generations.

You are thinking in far more modern terms than anything evolutionarily distant enough to affect this issue in a large portion of the population.

Additionally, even if you were looking to predict selection many generations in the future; modern reproduction happens at higher rates the lower in economic disparity you go, so clearly that isn’t the case.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#239

Post by lanstin »

TZubiri wrote: post #233
lanstin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is the model that matches acceleration of death rates as we age.

The reduction of death rates which is not due to panaceas but to fixing specific causes of death, one by one, yes.

I meant more like this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7272078/

Like it breaks down at an exponentially increasing rate. Hard to keep up with that.

Re: Sleep regularity is a stronger predictor of mortality than sleep duration (2023)

#240

Post by PittleyDunkin »

danparsonson wrote: post #20
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to argue a causative effect between one week of bad sleep and death potentially 10+ years out. Statistically—absolutely, I agree with you, but controls and sample sizes can always be improved. Narratively—it's also not difficult to see: "gunk builds up in brain; gunk requires regular removal; sleep removes gunk; stable sleep removes gunk better than unstable sleep" It's difficult to blame people for emoti…

Sure, but things that make narrative sense can easily fall down when examined - that's why the statistics are important and not just a rubber stamp. See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

No disagreement here, but equally you can't be surprised when people can grapple with the narrative easier than statistics. If you want the statistical understanding to propagate you need a narrative.
Post reply on HN