Light exposure at night predicts incidence of cardiovascular diseases

> We need to make it a lot cooler for researchers to not do original research all the time but to do replication and peer review.

This should be the work of grad students, not cranking out another paper or slaving for professors.

> We should also demand publication of failures -- it's ok to fail, but only if you publish about the failure.

I really want to have a journal that just publishes interesting duds. Someone else might look at your methodology and get their own idea.

To those who don't follow the link.

The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center ran a trial on parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft, and gave half the people jumping a placebo (empty backpack) instead of a parachute. No joke.

https://www.bmj.com/content/363/bmj.k5094

Grin?

> All authors suffered substantial abdominal discomfort from laughter.

>> Watson and Crick's paper describing the structure of DNA wasn't peer reviewed. > I'd point out that outliers exist but that was before peer review become so popular

what outlier? I just picked a famous example, there are almost infinitely many examples to choose from...

>> if you think they're wrong, try it for yourself and publish the results. > Watson and Crick or the article?

yes

> For a balanced discussion of the article, it's reasonable to point out a lack of peer review to give context to what stage this is at.

The first thing that the pre-print says, in bold at the top of the page, is that this is a non-peer-reviewed article and shouldn't be used for clinical practice. so commenting "it's not peer reviewed" doesn't add anything

> If "try it yourself" is the bar then I guess nobody comments? That doesn't seem like a good way to learn anything.

"try it yourself" is the bar for determining the validity of the results. A comment section is not going to be able to determine the validity. My whole point is that it's worth discussing the article without waiting for a final peer-reviewed version of it. If you disagree with the results, you can point out a perceived flaw in the study or find papers which contradict the results so we can discuss something concrete

it's the opposite. no doctor or insurance is going to change their policy based on a single result, you wait until a few separate groups have replicated the results. In the scientific community there is a reward (being cited) for pointing out that someone else's finding was wrong. The more important the initial finding, the more citations (and attention) you will get if you're the first one to correct the record. There's also a reward for building on an initial finding and going further, but you can only do that if the original finding stands. So one way or another the truth will come out.

Publishing a pre-print is only valuable if your result hold long term. You're just stating that you did it first.

> Whoever does not have a monetary interest in the studied subject is the one who is more qualified.

I’m not really understanding the monetary interest angle. The monetary interest in this subject is the curtain and window-blind manufacturers.

The researches here have a company who sells body worn light sensors. And if their light sensor is good maybe other researchers interested in verifying this phenomena will purchase a few units from them. But they are far from the only company making light sensors. In fact if i want to verify this study i would buy sensors from anyone but them. For the sake of having independent proof free from biases.

> they disappear into some third world country after taking their sum

What sum, please tell me? Where do you see the riches here?

That's not how the world works anymore, so it's a completely unrealistic expectation.

I've skimmed lots of studies about the relationship between light and health in the past.

In both humans and other animals, our internal sleep-wake clocks are synchronized to the day-night cycle through light exposure(and indeed, without it aren't even 24h-long), and have broad implications for mood, wakefulness, metabolism, and general health. I well might have seen something about cardiovascular problems specifically, though I don't remember.

It turns out they took both rural and urban samples too and there was no meaningful difference between the two populations. Exposure to indoor overhead light is probably far more significant than what streams in your window with the drapes shut.

6500k? Deliberately in the home??

Is this one of those things where some element is considered desirable in the Western world (e.g. warm white lighting) but is associated with destitution in another culture (because it’s like incandescent lighting)?

They grouped the population into percentiles with 0-50% having quite low exposure (0.62 lux median, range of 0-1.21) vs the 90%-100% percentile being 105 lux (range of 48.3-6400). You can compare the daylight light exposure to the nighttime and basically see what a shift worker would be.

But they already deconfounded for shift workers, so that's irrelevant. And they also showed the amount of light exposure for both night and day.

I agree.

I see it constantly when a study comes out all of these statistics students come out of the wood work and say "Correlation doesn't mean causation" without any other thought.

The study clearly claims only a correlation and absolutely, correlations help focus attention to try and find causal links in the future.

I agree, correlation certainly hints at a relationship.

However, I think you are just being triggered by past traumas, because nobody said that here.

I know several people that complain about the exact same thing. You just naturally wake up a lot earlier when it's bright and sunny around 4-5am. Most of nature does the same thing. All the birds get crazy active early morning. The expression "up with the lark" comes from that notion. I have light blocking curtains and they do help a little. But my bedroom faces east and I get the full blast of the Sun in the morning. Somehow this is fine and does not affect my energy levels too much.

These days I don't drink alcohol any more, which has done wonders for my sleep quality. Quitting alcohol works better than almost anything else you can do. Long summer nights of drinking beer in the park (which is one of the perks that Berlin has) are not that great for this. But still, I easily sleep to 9am in the winter and in the summer I usually am awake a lot earlier. I typically stay in bet for a bit.

I take vitamin D now but wasn't aware at the time. I never used the light therapy lamp but I had plenty of Italian colleagues that used one. The first time I encountered one of these things, I thought Apple had released some kind of new imac that I hadn't heard off yet. Until somebody explained to me that "no, that's a Philips bright light". Basically you wear some sun goggles and stare at it for fifteen minutes or so while you are blasted with what is indeed very bright.

The dark/light situation never affected me that much. But I could definitely see it in people around me. People from further south have a hard time dealing with darkness. Insomnia is something to guard for.

The Finnish are famously one of the most happy people around. But they also have relatively high suicide rates that spike in spring when after a miserably long winter, the availability of light pushes some people over the edge. As I used to morbidly joke, "Finland is so happy because all the unhappy people keep killing themselves thus removing themselves from these surveils". The Finnish love dark humor like that. This got a chuckle out some of them.

It's not, because the study specifically disambiguated for socioeconomic status.

The effect was also seen outside of the night worker population (13% of the population).

Why blue and not red/orange?

Hazards of living in Australia ...

In HK village houses the spiders are outside ... we look for snakes swimming up from septic tanks (yes they are still used even in some new village houses) or coming through bath drain that goes to outside drain (yes still a thing).

I live in a rural area.