Why does sleeping more than eight or seven hours increase the odds for a stroke?
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This seems like the kind of thing that is not directly related but more an expression of the same issue. People who sleep above average amounts of time are more likley to be suffering from mental health issues or more likley to live a sedentary lifestyle, which of course does increase your risk of cardiovascular incidents such as stroke.
Sleep is important for a lot of processes in your body. A lot of them have to do with hormones. Having too much or too little sleep could cause a hormone imbalance, and hormone imbalances can do all sorts of damage.
Having too little sleep can cause high blood pressure, which increases the risk of stroke. During sleep, your blood pressure falls. Having low blood pressure also increases stroke risk. These are just two of the many issues potentially caused by sleep problems
It’s not necessarily a cause and effect thing.
It’s not clear why increased sleep would lead to strokes, or something about being more likely to have a stroke gets you sleeping more.
What is more likely is that there is something that about a risk factor for strokes that is also associated with sleeping more hours, rather than a direct link between the two factors.
It probably doesn’t, as others have mentioned. People at higher risk of stroke are probably sleeping more.
It’s thought to be reverse causation. Those people that are ill and higher risk of strokes, sleep more. When you are ill then your body sleeps more to help it deal with the illness or other issues.
If you took that population and reduced their sleep to less than 7 hours, it’s likely the chance of stroke would actually increase.
Is it a fact that sleeping more than 7-8h causes strokes?
As others have pointed out, this is a very common problem of not realizing the difference between correlation and causation. For basic science literacy I think this is the most important thing for people to understand.
there is a correlation between sleeping more than average, and having a stroke . i’m not sure how the studies were done, but it could be that they survey people who had strokes and asked about how much sleep these people tend to get on average before hand. or you could survey people about their sleep, and for people who sleep more than average, you could do a study, where you follow them for a number of years and see what percentage get strokes compared to the general population.
when we see these correlations, it is tempting to assume that one thing directly causes the other. But, as others have said in their posts, here, there could be many explanations that do not require extra sleeping, being a direct, causative factor of strokes. For example, sleep apnea puts people at higher risk for strokes. Also, people with sleep apnea often do not feel rested, so they may sleep more hours than usual.
The greatest risk factor of stroke is high blood pressure. Not sleeping enough or too much increases your risk for a common medical condition like high blood pressure.
Edit: changed the word highest to greatest for readability
Could bring inactive in bed increase your risk of blood clots? Like in the hospital they put those compression devices on your legs if you’re in bed a lot.
Correlation VS Causation, my friend. It is unfortunate how much misinformation is spread based around just these two simple premises.
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