Insomnia is bad news for men: Early death

William Atkins
Thursday, 02 September 2010 21:20

Science - Health

According to U.S. research from Pennsylvania State University, men who have chronic insomnia, and sleep less than six hours per night on average, have a much greater risk of premature death than women.

Specifically, men have just over a four times greater risk of early death from insomnia than do women.

Their research was published in the journal Sleep (Volume 33, Issue 09, Wednesday, September 01, 2010),

The title of their paper is “Insomnia with Short Sleep Duration and Mortality: The Penn State Cohort”

Insomnia is defined as the inability of, or a difficulty in, falling or staying asleep. Around 30% of people in the United States have form form of insomnia. About 10 to 15% have chronic (long-term) insomnia.

Within this study, chronic insomniac was defined as anyone who had insomnia consistently for at least one year.

The Pennsylvania researchers studied 1,731 men and women, between the ages of 20 and 100 years (with an average age of 50 years), randomly selected from the population in central Pennsylvania, surrounding their college setting at Pennsylvania State University.

The subjects were initially studied in a sleep laboratory (between the years of 1990 and 1995, for men, and 1994 and 1997, for women), and they were then analyzed over a 14-year period for men and 10-year period for women.

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