The benefits of adequate sleep are well established. Insufficient sleep can adversely affect the mental processes, including concentration, and over all bodily functions. It also increases the risk for cardiovascular diseases, obesity diabetes, and cancer.
A new study looks at the other side of the coin: too much sleep (more than eight hours each night) appears to be associated with a 46-percent higher risk for stroke, compared to those who normally sleep between six to eight hours every night.
The findings of Yue Leng and his research team at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom were published in the journal, Neurology.
The US National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours of sleep each night for persons between 18-64 years old.
This study of 9,692 individuals followed up for a period of almost 10 years, with an average age of 62, showed that sleeping for more than 8 hours each night was linked to 46 percent higher rate of stroke. Annually in the United States almost 800,000 people develop stroke, a condition where the blood supply to the brain is diminished or cut off, caused by a blood clot in the artery that brings blood to the brain or a tear in an artery in the brain.
It is unclear if the stroke in this study was actually caused by the “long sleep” (more than 8 hours a night) or by another medical factor.
“It is more likely that extended sleep duration could serve as an early warning sign of increased stroke risk, particularly in older people,” Leng told Medical News Today. “In any case, the finding should not be interpreted as ‘restrict sleep duration so as to cut stroke risk.’”
According to Leng, “the increased sleep duration among participants might have indicated excessive sleepiness and fatigue result of declining health…. and “the big increase in sleep needs might also reflect alterations in blood flow in the brain and thus serve as an early sign of future stroke risk. However, the exact biological mechanism remains unclear and requires confirmation from physiological studies.”
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2 in 3 smokers will die early
As a part of a long-term study on healthy aging among more than 200,000 persons at the Sax Institute in Australia, the researchers found that “two-thirds of smokers will die early if they don’t quit.” The same report states that “its never too late to quit smoking.”
While it was a well-known fact that smoking was unhealthy, causing a host of lung and heart diseases, and various cancers, this study provided a “direct independent evidence that confirms the disturbing findinhs that have been emerging internationally,” according to Emily Banks, scientific director of the Sax study and a researcher atr the Australian National University.
In Australia, smokers have been found “to have a 3-fold risk for premature death compared to those who never smoked, and die an estimated ten years earlier than nonsmokers…Those who smoked a pack a day raises the risk to 4 or 5-fold,” reported this study, which was published in the journal BMC Medicine.
This new research also found that the old notion that 50 percent of smokers would die early was not accurate. The new study puts the death toll at 67 percent.
The positive and inspiring finding in the study is the fact that it is never too late to quit to lower the risk and improve longevity.
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Deadly C. diff infection
In 2011, the bug Clostridium difficile infected almost half a million people in the United States, killing 15,000 of them, according to a study led and funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
This C. diff bacterium causes inflammation of the colon (colitis), an infection spread by contact with surfaces, items, contaminated by human feces, basically through poor hygiene. The symptoms include nausea, diarrhea, fever, abdominal pains and loss of appetite.
Persons who are on antibiotic are more prone to C. diff infection because antibiotics destroy the friendly (protective) bacteria in the intestines and allow the C. diff to take over, and overwhelm and infect the colon. Our body needs the normal intestinal flora that grows the friendly bacteria, the reason some people are advised to take pro-biotics (Lactobacillus acidophilus).
Past clinical reviews showed that about 30 percent to 50 percent of antibiotic prescribed in hospitals and clinics are not needed or for the wrong bugs, putting patients at risk of C. diff infection, especially in nursing homes since the elderly are more susceptible to infection in general. More than 80 percent of the deaths caused by C. diff were 65 and older.
A separate study revealed that a 10 percent decrease in the use of antibiotics in various hospitals was associated with a 34 percent drop in C. Diff infection.
The main thrust of the CDC study that spanned 10 geographic regions in the USA, involving 453,000 patients with C. diff infection, with 29,300 deaths, was to warn the public about self-medication, especially with antibiotics and to admonish physicians to use antibiotic with strict indication, caution and prudence.
It is evident that a more judicious use of antibiotics by the prescribing physician, following strict guidelines of evidence-based standard for antimicrobial therapy, and adding antibiotics as drugs that strictly require a prescription from a physician to prevent self-medication, would go a long way to controlling C. diff infection and the development of bacterial resistance to antibiotics due to abuse. Drug resistant infections are usually fatal.
If we continued to be irresponsible and careless in our use of antibiotics which would induce the bacteria to mutate for their survival by developing resistance to antibiotics, medical care would be thrown back to the pre-penicillin “stone” age, where even minor infections were untreatable and fatal.
Let us not abuse the wonderful blessings we have. Our survival might someday depend on them.
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Philip S. Chua, MD, FACS, FPCS, Cardiac Surgeon Emeritus in Northwest Indiana and chairman of cardiac surgery from 1997 to 2010 at Cebu Doctors University Hospital, where he holds the title of Physician Emeritus in Surgery, is based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, the Philippine College of Surgeons, and the Denton A. Cooley Cardiovascular Surgical Society. He is the chairman of the Filipino United Network – USA, a 501(c)(3) humanitarian foundation in the United States. Email: [email protected]
