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Short Sleep, Mortality and Illness

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Sleeplessness

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Abstract

Epidemiological studies pointing to statistically significant correlations between habitual short sleep and an increased likelihood of death, cardiovascular disease, and other physical illnesses can be misleading when based on small changes from large samples. Although such findings buttress the apparent risks of ‘sleep debt’, the actual effects are often small in terms of ‘clinical significance’, and do not point to short sleep as an actual cause, but rather, to common, deeper underlying reasons, where more sleep alone is not the answer. Besides, ‘short sleep’ can just be a ‘catch-all’ for sleeping fewer than seven hours, whereas these associations are mostly apparent with habitual sleep being around five hours, when the greater risk is for sleepiness and a related accident.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK

    Jim Horne

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  1. Jim Horne
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Horne, J. (2016). Short Sleep, Mortality and Illness. In: Sleeplessness. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30572-1_3

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