Feb12
One more reason to like naps
Breaking News
Naps help prevent heart-related deaths
A study conducted in Greece, having more than 23,000 Greek adults as subjects, demonstrates that afternoon naps helps prevent heart-related deaths.
According to the study, the results of which are published in the February 12, 2007 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals, there’s evidence to suggest that in countries where siestas are common, the rate of death from heart disease tend to be lower.
Only a few studies have assessed the potential relationship between heart-related deaths and naps, or, for that matter, sleep. Those studies also were not controlled for other factors that may influence heart disease risk, such as physical activity and age, according to background information in the article. In plain language, the researchers involved didn’t screen the participants for variables that could have an impact on the outcome when it came to those crucial factors.
Between 1994 and 1999, Androniki Naska, Ph.D., University of Athens Medical School, Greece, along with his colleagues, studied 23,681 Greek men and women between the ages of 20 to 86.
Getting the information upfront
To be involved in Naska’s study, the participants could not have a history of heart disease or any other severe condition when they enrolled in the study.
One of the first phases of the study involved asking the participants if they took midday naps.
That’s something I remember reading about in junior high school. It fascinated me why other some other countries had this custom of taking a nap in the middle of the day, but here, in the U.S., it’s hustle-bustle. “Hurry up! Get over here!” It seems we, as Americans, have always had to live life in the fast lane, which science repeatedly demonstrates is not always wise, at least from the health perspective.
When the study participants were talking about their napping habits, they were quizzed about the frequency and the length of naps. Personally, I prefer a daily nap, either 45 minutes or 90 minutes long. A sleep cycle goes in 45 minute cycles, so instead of trying to wake me (read that as: bombs won’t wake me when you catch me in the wrong place in my sleep cycle) at the wrong time, I simply set my alarm for the right time frame and life is good.
Next up for the study’s participants: discussion about their level of physical activity and dietary habits for the year prior to becoming involved in the study. That’s to get a good baseline about each participant, knowing if they were regular visitors to the gym, folks who did some jogging and biking, or others who were sedentary, using the daily routine of walking the dog and taking out the trash as exercise.
Over an average of 6.32 years of follow-up, 792 participants died, including 133 who died from heart disease, the study’s authors report.
Do you like naps?
Now comes the interesting part.
After the researchers factored in other cardiovascular risk factors, individuals who took naps of any frequency and duration — folks who napped at all — showed a 34 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who did not take midday naps.
Those folks, much like me, who are classified as “systematic nappers” — people who nap for 30 minutes or more at least three times per week — had a 37 percent lower risk of heart-related death. Wow! Now that’s the stuff of which dreams are made! No pun intended, but give me a pillow and I don’t care either way.
Among working men in the study, the authors found that those who took midday naps — either occasionally or systematically — had a 64 percent lower risk of death from heart disease during the study than those who did not nap.
The odds were almost slashed in half for non-working men who napped. They had only a 36 percent reduction in risk, but that’s still better than those who didn’t nap.
What about the women?
Since women were involved in the study, the numbers should be somewhat similar, right? Well, not necessarily.
The authors say they couldn’t really do any analysis on women in this time. They explained the problem:
“We were unable to undertake a similar analysis among women because there were only six deaths among working women,” the authors write.
Does that mean working women fare better than working men? Did those women take more naps than men? Did the women have jobs that allowed them to sleep at will? There’s no answer to that, at all. That will have to be answered in another study, sadly.
Shakedown time for HR and boss-types
Maybe it’s time that human resources departments, supervisors, and well, even companies, as a whole, take a whole new look at the work day.
The authors summarized their findings, saying,
“We interpret our findings as indicating that among healthy adults, siesta, possibly on account of stress-releasing consequences, may reduce coronary mortality,” they said. The fact that the association was stronger in working men, who likely face job-related stress, than non-working men is compatible with this hypothesis, they write.
“This is an important finding because the siesta habit is common in many parts of the world, including the Mediterranean region and Central America,” the authors conclude.
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2 Responses to “One more reason to like naps”
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LynnT Feb 14th 2007 at 09:07 pm 1
This may be news to these researchers, but it’s kind of a no-brainer for most of us.
Of course, now researchers have recorded data on it, so it’s validated. Let us celebrate the scientific method.
But it won’t make any practical difference. Sleep is a vice in the Western world, and sleeping in the daytime is considered a deep perversity which would doubtless be stamped out in a better world. It’s hard to imagine a natural necessity held in deeper contempt than sleep is in this culture.
The medical and scientific community has known (intellectually) for a long time that sleep deprivation does bad things to the body, but that knowledge doesn’t translate into policy in the real world.
Maybe it would make a difference if medical school didn’t include a couple of years of deliberate sleep deprivation. A lot of doctors forget how old they were when they did those years. Your body can stand a lot of abuse when you are younger that it just won’t tolerate as you age. And doctors are the front line in dealing with fatigue complaints. The problem there is that most of them don’t consider complaints of fatigue valid. It can’t just be fatigue, it must be something else. If it is fatigue, shame on you! Get off your fat ass and do something!
Fatigue indeed.
But hey - if we can log another hundred years of research confirming this, maybe something will change, so let’s hope somebody keeps on funding it. Just don’t count on the funding coming from corporate industry. Corporate industry figures sleeping is time wasted that could be used more productively.
I guess that depends on what you consider productive, doesn’t it?
Dave J. (Scoop0901) Feb 15th 2007 at 06:47 pm 2
Lynn, unfortunately, things take time.
If you look 50 years, 40 years, and 30 years back in time, you see diabetes was still overcoming a lot of learning obstacles in the medical community.
With sleep, that’s were things are right now.
If things are to change, then companies that have a direct interest in the field of sleep — manufacturers of equipment, whether for testing people for sleep disorders, treating people for sleep disorders, and other things — then they need to invest some of their money into public education and outreach.
Look at the pharmaceutical companies. They are aggressive in getting the message to the market about things such as restless legs syndrome (RLS). Or even that butterfly and the ads about insomnia.
No, those commercials are NOT the proper approach. Those commercials are advocating the wrong message: you have something wrong, here it is, and pop a pill and be fixed.
Nah, that’s just wrong. Education, education, education. Without education, you have the situation where you are today: with people running to the physician’s office after seeing a 30-second ad, saying, “Doctor, I need a prescription of XYZ because I have SQT disease.” The doctor says something like, “How do you know?” The person says, “Oh, I saw an ad with a cute bunny rabbit pushing this pill that will cure my ails.”
So what do we do, Lynn, to open people’s eyes, but, more importantly, get the profit-making entities forking out their bucks to get information to the masses?