Posted by Kevin (in Walla Walla) on February 15, 2002 at 10:32:29:

In Reply to: A new study on Sleep Requirements? posted by RandallPink on February 15, 2002 at 07:36:43:

The study is being published today in the Achives of General Psychiatry. I've read the whole article, and seen some of the original data (which is 20 years old!).

The basic science of the study is flawed. The data was collected by diary and anecdotal evidence. No true measures of actual sleep were used. Participants in the study were not evaluated for sleep disorders, nor seen by sleep specialists.

The flaws in the study are:
1. Humans are terrible at "estimating" how much sleep they actually get. Most insomnia studies show that insomniacs underestimate how much sleep they actually get by 1 to 2 hours per night.
2. The study did not look at how much sleep from naps people were getting.
3. The study did not look at how sleep disorders affect how much sleep you report getting. For instance, many people with OSA report getting 8 to 10 hours of sleep a day, and keep falling asleep. The OSA is the reason they report sleeping more than 6-7 hours a night. Thus, if you didn't know that untreated OSA patients have a higher mortality rate, and didn't check to see if the longer sleepers had OSA, you could (wrongly) state that long sleepers had higher mortality rates than short sleepers.

Bad study design. Bad data analysis. Bad article.

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