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A comment on Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death.

Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by vichu on Friday November 16, 2018 @01:45PM (#18470909)
This seems intuitively incorrect especially if insomnia is linked "with illnesses such as dementia and depression". If they are controlling for these "confounding factors", it's highly possible that they're just eliminating the side effects of insomnia that result in an early death. It would be intuitive that someone that suffers from insomnia but suffers none of the major side effects probably wouldn't have a higher mortality rate. If they remove these controls, the results might look very different. If anyone can find the full text of the study, it'd be nice to look at.

This also flies in the face of things like Fatal Familial Insomnia and Sporadic Fatal Insomnia where patients soon die after suffering though months and months of insomnia[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia

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Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by marmaduke on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:12PM (#18472003)
The abstract doesn’t say anything really, only that a meta analysis of existing studies reject null hypotheses that insomnia is linked to death. This isn’t really that useful, and digging deeper requires looking into the details of the studies. When all those results are pooled together, it only takes one bad study to skew the meta analysis.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S108707921...

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Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by AlexCoventry on Friday November 16, 2018 @07:17PM (#18473028)
I think the null hypothesis is that insomnia is uncorrelated with mortality, and the meta analysis failed to reject it.
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Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by ThePlantOfFire on Friday November 16, 2018 @04:29PM (#18472127)
>This also flies in the face of things like Fatal Familial Insomnia and Sporadic Fatal Insomnia

No it doesn't. Those are prion diseases that cause protein transcription errors in the brain. It is completely different from normal insomnia. Not a good example.

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Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by drpgq on Friday November 16, 2018 @06:40PM (#18472873)
Ridiculously few people die of fatal familial insomnia
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Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by tonto on Friday November 16, 2018 @08:28PM (#18473335)
That is because FFI is very rare not because it doesn't kill you
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Re:Insomnia: 'No link' between sleepless nights and early death by Dylan16807 on Saturday November 17, 2018 @01:37AM (#18474316)
Yes, and?

When 0% of a group have the deadly variant, that variant is useless for establishing an overall link to early death.

[ Parent | on HN ]