Late to Bed, Early to Die? Night Owls May Die Sooner | Hacker News Reader

Late to Bed, Early to Die? Night Owls May Die Sooner

livescience.com

Evening people were at greater risk for certain health conditions, including diabetes, psychological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, neurological disorders and respiratory conditions, the study found. But even after accounting for these conditions, the study still found that evening people had a slightly higher risk of dying during the study period, compared with morning people.

Translation: There's probably some more confounding variables they haven't found yet.

All of those illnesses are tied with circadian desynchrony problems. If you screw with the clock gene in a mouse for example, or poke at the part of the hypothalamus that controls sleep-wake cycles (the suprachiasmatic nucleus), those mice will die early of heart disease and cancer.

Fun fact: one of the top genes associated with type-2 diabetes, for example, is the melatonin receptor!

These are hardly confounds, but more end-points of diseases of aging, which can be accelerated when the bodies homeostatic control of anabolism and catabolism is broken.

In short, there is much that remains to be done to find the associations between sleep architecture, aging, and human health outcomes.

http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short

https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275...

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177

Likely a circular effect. All of those things can be disruptive to sleep.

All true and good stuff -- But I think the OP is pointing out that being a Night Owl is probably confounded (majorly) with a significant range of other health and lifestyle factors.

This is always a major challenge in these types of studies. It's useful research - but it often ends up as a news headline "doing X is a factor in Death." Which is often misleading.

This is also why calcified pineal glands and fluoride poisoning may actually be a big deal. Sadly, not enough serious researchers want to consider pineal gland health.

I even saw one researcher who published one paper advocating global fluoridation of community water supplies and another paper investigating problems associated with melatonin deficiency. But they didn't have any papers investigating the relationship between these.

In case you are curious, fluorine ions have an affinity for highly mineral rich regions of the body, and easily precipitate calcium, which is why fluoride is used for calcifying teeth. The pineal gland is the only organ in the brain that is directly exposed to the bloodstream, and is a kind of mineral sink. Pineal calcification is epidemic in adults, but is not popularly considered a "disease." This organ is totally unappreciated by mainstream "science based" medical culture.

The pineal gland is responsible for melatonin synthesis and harmonizing the circadian rhythm. It has cells that communicate with light receptive cells in the eye. Indeed, this organ evolved as a light sensitive organ. In many animals, the pineal body is still directly light sensitive.

I have a very strong feeling that this important gland is being overlooked by the medical establishment, but that it will be impossible to ignore its importance in times to come.

Here's a little experiment you can do in your kitchen. Take some egg shells. Boil them to sterilize them. Then crush them with a mortar into a fine powder. Mix them with vinegar (acetic acid) to create a calcium salt (calcium acetate). There will be bubbles as the acetate precipitates calcium. This powder substance is a calcium salt which can be added to fluoridated water to neutralize fluorine ions. The fluorine ions which will have a much stronger affinity for the calcium than the acetate.

If someone is really good with chemistry, maybe they could figure out the exact amounts needed to needed to adsorb all of the fluorine from a liter of water!

This is an interesting hypothesis, but your presentation of it is off in a way that sets off my crackpot detector. If you can regenerate the components of the argument with citations to reputable sources, it may be worth re-presenting it somewhere with less editorializing. But any time you talk about water fluoridation, you have to be very careful not to accidentally import information from the web of schizophrenics-citing-schizophrenics that most discussion of that topic comes from, and also to credibly signal that you're being careful in that way.

Okay, so I appreciate your willingness to take interest in the theory.

That said, to be perfectly honest, I'm offended by your use of both the words "crackpot" and "schizophrenic". Essentially you're asking me to write a literature review in order not to be considered "a crackpot" or "schizophrenic". Schizophrenia and crack are both quite serious issues, so in the first place I'm annoyed that these are considered to be normal derogatory language for "rational" people to casually throw around. You're suggesting that my comment is full of "editorializing", but then you go ahead and demonstrate exactly the kind of dogmatic, biased language that charges me to write in this way to begin with. I know you probably didn't mean harm, but that is strong, derogatory language you're throwing around in the name of science. Why?

If you're feeling open minded, check out the variety of articles here: http://fluoridealert.org/studytracker/

There are 232 pages of studies to dig through.

Some day I'd love to write a full article on the subject. But I have a feeling that no matter how scientific it was, there would be a crowd so skeptical as to be blind. Maybe that's cause their pineal glands are too far calcified ;p

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18755628/

Degree of pineal calcification (DOC) is associated with polysomnographic sleep measures in primary insomnia patients.

Some minor points:

- The pineal gland isn't the only organ in the brain directly sensitive to the bloodstream. The base of the hypothalamus, specifically at the arcuate nucleus, can sample blood-born hormones via the Hypophyseal portal system, which is the same permeabilized brain region responsible for the pineal glands' exposure to the bloodstream.

- Its also the hypothalamus that senses light levels, via the suprachiasmatic nuclei located just above the optic nerves. Its those neurons that sense light levels via retinal photoganglion cells. The SCN maintains the clock but then signals the pineal on its own. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15193530

I find the calcification hypothesis interesting. Certainly damage to the arcuate nucleus (gliosis) has been implicated in hypothalamic aging and obesity, and I contend that other forms of brain damage due to blood-born exposures are possible.

It would be neat to try correlating water flouride levels to millions of fitbit accounts .... if only encouraging people to donate their data for science was easier....

Thanks for this excellent clarification!

Thanks for this. As always with big population studies, there's a huge risk of getting your result by failing to control for something. Or, conversely, missing a real relationship by controlling for something else it predicts.

Or for most studies, both. Probably you missed some key confounder, and probably you also controlled away some of the real effects. So "correlation found" ends up meaning "the missed confounders beat out the improper controls".

(Does being a 'night owl' cause depression, which shortens lifespans? It certainly sounds plausible, so controlling for psychological disorders raises an eyebrow. And so on, for a dozen other controls.)

In turn, thank you.

And yeah, one of the other things that I find annoying about these studies that follow this paradigm of, "Control for everything you can think of, and then make a big deal of any residual effect, as if it's somehow implying an independent causative relationship," is that they don't seem to really distinguish between probable mediators and probable confounders.

Which makes sense, I suppose. If you're just on an easter egg hunt for p-values, then I guess you don't really need to care about how an analysis decision might affect the practical utility or theoretical value of your findings.

I'm a primary insomniac, but I also have delayed sleep phase disorder so my natural circadian rhythm is offset by a few hours. Regardless of light exposure and regular routines I'll often find myself hitting peak sleepiness in the late afternoon and then the early morning. Unfortunately, this isn't exactly compatible with society's expectations of when I should be up and about. I find it interesting (though I'm not surprised) that the article seems to imply that even those who get enough sleep, just on an offset schedule, still have greater rates of mortality. Sleeping disorders are often associated with other significant issues in their own right so there's definitely a degree of variable confounding.

> I find it interesting (though I'm not surprised) that the article seems to imply that even those who get enough sleep, just on an offset schedule, still have greater rates of mortality.

They seemed to be suggesting that the offset is not a risk factor in itself, more that it's incompatibility with society imposes external stresses that contribute to increase chance of mortality. If that's true it no doubt varies greatly between individuals, their profession, lifestyle and other general interaction with the outside world - which all themselves will of course contribute to different chances of mortality and health.

Full Disclosure: My morning is most peoples lunchtime. I get plenty of sleep and am usually very well rested, but waking up out of sync can be quite irritating and inconvenient once I am actually awake. Not to mention the feeling of being "the lazy one" in spite of being quite a workaholic most of the time.

There are a thousand of these health/nutrition articles every year, all telling you that this or that has a small effect on your health and life. Given how hard it is to reproduce these studies and how minimal the effects are, I find it hard to care.

They are epidemiological and their goal isn't to really prove anything but to generate new hypotheses and provide hints for directions of research based on the correlations found. Unfortunately, the popular press doesn't tend to distinguish between epidemiology and more rigorous double-blind studies.

tldr; Night Owls May Die Sooner *

(* when living in a morning person world)

That which differs from the norm must be destroyed!

The Obese May Die Sooner * (* when living in a skinny persons world)

It seems like the article was saying that a morning persons world is naturally healthier, not that morning people are somehow afflicting non-morning people

It said the exact opposite:

"The researchers said society needs to recognize that making night owls start work early may not be good for their health."

It's interesting to me that the ascribed the increase in mortality for night-owls to the fact that their schedule doesn't mesh with societies expectations - I suspect they'll also find that it's not good to have a sleep cycle that's too out-of-sync with the daylight hours (we already know a lack of sunlight during the winter hours affects some people and we use apps like F.Lux to dim our screens to avoid tricking our minds with extra daylight frequencies).

Maybe, but odds are that they will have more fun and die happier than us early birds. (No, I didn't read the article. :)

Or even, more waking hours total over their shorter span of years?

As someone who has worked nightshift, I have heard it can cause cancer. It doesn't look good for us.

[1]: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312064.php

Is it due to not getting enough sunlight (vitamin D)?

Adrenal burnout is associated with rising energy levels as the day progresses (ie, one way to create a night owl) and a constant stress state.

NutrEval (include hormone panel) catches many imbalances/deficiencies. It can almost be assumed vitamin D (+ K), vitamin E, and magnesium are low. Vitamin D (+ K) strongly affects the pineal gland and melatonin release.

Resveratrol in the morning resets circadian rhythm, as does melatonin at night.

If fixing deficiencies/imbalances does not "normalize" circadian rhythm, then that's the natural rhythm and is something to work around.

#MorningPeopleAreSmug

Yet, nowhere in the article did they mention what time is their half-a-million represents for a night owl, 11PM, 12AM, 1AM?

There was a lot of curious phrasing in the article and is very unclear. It starts off with the line "those who tend to stay up late and sleep in well past sunrise are at increased risk of early death". But then goes on to talk about the health consequences of Night Hawks trying to live as Morning Larks.

So the article is saying don't sleep in or you'll die young but if you get up early your health will suffer adversely?

Also seems to hinge on whether the participants "consider themselves" to be a night-owl. If the effect is there, you should be able to stratify by, say, regularly going to bed after 1am (or whatever). This doesn't seem to be that.

Exactly. I think people categorize themselves relative to those around them.

At the beginning of the study period, participants were asked whether they considered themselves to be morning people or evening people, or whether they felt they fell somewhere in between those two groups.

Seem like a narrow minded study that found a consistent variable coincidentally and pointing it out as the cause

"The researchers said society needs to recognize that making night owls start work early may not be good for their health."

It's not that being a night owl means you are going to die sooner, it's that a society run by morning larks is detrimental to night owl health.

If you have a fringe behaviour on any dimensions, where you are unlike the average, there are only two possibilities, you've evolved a superior trait, or you've evolved an inferior trait.

I feel evolutionary wise, chances are higher that you've evolved an inferior trait.

I am offset in my sleep, 3am to noon, and I need a minimum of 9hours to feel rested, 10hour of sleep is ideal. Now to be honest, this doesn't sound like the recipe to a superior trait, so I'm not too surprised if it ended up costing me something like additional health issues later in life. Sadly :(

interesting, maybe humans have a fixed bandwidth on "awake hours", and night owls just burn through the stock quicker...

Studies have shown sleeping for longer also correlates with increased mortality. Although I've not seen a study which establishes the causality of this. It's plausible that people who are sleeping longer are doing it because (potentially undiagnosed) diseases are making them lethargic, rather than oversleeping causing disease.

I think a study would have to take a set of people and force sleeping habits upon them for a significant length of time for the results to be meaningful with regards to causality.

> It's plausible that people who are sleeping longer are doing it because (potentially undiagnosed) diseases are making them lethargic

That was the main theory behind that correlation, it makes sense since healthy people will naturally find it quite difficult to sleep longer than 8 hours (of actual uninterrupted sleep). Some people will also sleep longer because of issues affecting their quality of sleep (health or otherwise)

There need not be a physical cause for excess sleep. Emotional disturbances or drug use can also lead to mini escapades to the bedroom. This can cause your body to adapt to a longer sleeping pattern; bypassing the pain of sleep fatigue healthy people have.

That certainly seems to be the story with me -- not drugs, per se, but general greediness and over-stimulation puts me on a ~24.5 hour cycle. When the mind is making a lot of noise it's harder to get to sleep and it takes more sleep to recover.

That said, I suspect there's no fundamental reason why a night owl can't become a morning lark if he sincerely wants to.

The article mentions that in the study there was little difference in the self-reported sleep times of night-owls and morning folk. So probably not.

I remember seeing this same conclusion from a study over 5 years ago. That one also mistook correlation for causation.

“For example, some studies have shown that evening people are less likely to eat a healthy diet and more likely to use substances such as alcohol and illegal drugs, compared with morning people.”

Where can I acquire research funding? I have groundbreaking hypotheses I would like to test such as “people who smile more are happier” or “people who have high net worth are more likely to purchase expensive watches”. I am highly qualified to pursue this research - I have a solid foundation in high school statistics and took a freshman sociology course.

What common sense would suggest is true very often doesn't align with what research has found to actually be true.

Don't take the world for granted. Don't assume you understand something just because the answer seems obvious.

In fact, the example you gave - people who smile more are happier - is true, but the cause is possibly the opposite of what the sentence implies. Some people are happy more because they force themselves to smile; they're not smiling because they're happy.[1]

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/smile-it-could-ma...

On the other hand, throwing enough p = .05 studies at the world lets you 'learn' all sorts of unintuitive - and untrue - things.

That smiling/happiness result, for example, looks to be another casualty of the replication crisis. [1] Could it be true? Maybe, but at the quality of existing research it's not clear studying it was an improvement on intuition. Checking our instincts with data is a good thing to do, but it's hardly a silver bullet when searching for the truth.

[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/cover_story...

Those are two entirely separate questions. Poorly designed studies vs the studies's subject matter.

Part of me is dumbfounded it's an actual study, but part of me is unsurprised at the same time

I guess I don't understand why.

I don't see it that way. This research is a good first step to show that there is a problem that warrants further investigation.

The big question remaining now is why? Are night owls less healthy because they are forcing their body into an unnatural rhythm? Or are the genes associated with being a night owl also responsible for these other health issues?

Problem with that is they are not describing regular healthy "evening people".

They are describing people who couldn't care less at what time they wake up because they were in a substance induced coma up to their random waking hour.

Of course those are going to die sooner.

I wish they would find a way to filter those out and test only on people whose internal clock is simply shifted.

The old “myth of common sense”.

https://youtu.be/D9XF0QOzWM0

Are you a software engineer? Surely you’ve been bitten enough by “that’s obviously true” to welcome a revalidation of assumptions in slightly different contexts?

https://musiccog.ohio-state.edu/Music829C/hindsight.bias.htm...

Not every "common sense" hypothesis turns out to be true, hence the seemingly useless studies.

I know a Psych professor who will always open her first lecture with a statement about the 'obvious,' i.e. "How many here know that babies have no gauge of attractiveness towards people, and thus don't prefer to be around attractive people?". After half the class has raised their hands, she'll then inform the class how the opposite is true, and studies have shown that babies actually prefer to be around more conventionally attractive people.

What I mean to explain with this anecdote is that it's very common to dismiss correlations as common sense, when one could just as easily make a 'common sense' assertion about the opposite.

That's often a good test, in fact -- try to develop a 'common sense' assertion for an opposing side, such as "Why would waking up earlier be correlated to healthier eating?". If it's possible to do so, then the common sense probably isn't so common after all.

"How many here know that babies have no gauge of attractiveness towards people, and thus don't prefer to be around attractive people?"

I can’t even begin to fathom the amount of sophistic assumptions and bad data you would need to reach a conclusion for a question like that. And then you would have to look in the mirror and say to yourself “my contribution to society is spending research money to determine whether or not babies prefer to be around attractive people”

Please don't post shallow dismissals to HN, even if you're right. There's a cap on how interesting discussions that start this way can ever become, and it's simply not that high.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

By that reckoning I should have been long dead. Of course this is 'statistics' and I'm just one individual but I do believe there are compensating factors. If you're a night owl but you otherwise live a healthy life you could very well outlive your early rising, smoking, hard-drinking cousin.

These overly simplistic conclusions from single cause to effect add up to unrealistic expectations of what living like a saint could achieve. So far nobody seems to have been able to beat 135 or so, and even that must be the best way to spend a large chunk of your life terribly bored.

Playgrounds, home improvement, participating in traffic, working late -> reduced life expectancy.

So, the best way to live a really long life is to be an early riser and to never leave your house.

I didn't read it as a direct cause and effect, as they were talking about a 10% increased chance of early death due to forcing their natural circadian rhythm to match everyone else. And they even recommended letting night owls have different schedules at work as one possible solution.

> I didn't read it as a direct cause and effect, as they were talking about a 10% increased chance of early death due to forcing their natural circadian rhythm to match everyone else.

Yes, that and about 100 or so factors the study did not control for. I really have had quite enough of all these studies that indicate substantial effects on your lifespan depending on some minor detail in your life and then some marginally significant result. That and that for every study like that you can probably find a counterpart. Ditto heart disease and cancer.

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