Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
More on that shortly.
But first, let's find out more about how our sleep habits are studied.
Although some studies have shown that eight-hour sleep is associated with health problems...
We probably shouldn't talk about eight hours so precisely in the view of Franco Capuccio, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and epidemiology at the University of Warwick in the UK.
He's done a detailed analysis of sleep studies.
Because people aren't very good at accurately reporting how long they're sleeping for.
So relying on people's self-reports makes this an uncertain science, and apparently we have a tendency to overestimate how long we've been asleep.
But if you think you sleep between six and eight hours a night on average, like three-quarters of people say they do in countries like the US and the UK, you've got nothing to worry about, he says.
More or less than that, though, does appear to carry a risk of developing conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, or worse.
How big is this risk?
When the researchers went back to the people they'd surveyed, they found that 12% more short sleepers had died compared to the six to eight hour sleepers.
And when the researchers went back to the long sleepers, even more of them had died, 30% more compared to the number of six to eight hour sleepers.
So it seems at first sight that too much sleep is worse for you than too little sleep.
But that's not what's going on, Franco Capuccio says.
Short sleep is bad for you, that's pretty clear, he says, pointing to other studies which have shown that if you deprive people of sleep, it does cause a bad physical reaction.
But another sleep specialist in the UK, Professor Jim Horne, argues that sleep deprivation experiments have been too extreme, put people under too much stress for the results to be reliable.
He's a sleep expert, but says we should think more about what's going on in our waking hours.
Although Franco Capuccio says things like stress are taken account of when analysing experiment results.
But what about the apparently even larger ill effects of long sleep?
This is where Jim Horne and Franco Capuccio agree.
Showing 821–840 of 4,250 · page 42 of 213
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