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Evening people were at greater risk for certain health conditions, including diabetes, psychological disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, neurological disorde

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.

subcosmos 9y ago
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 http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275.6.h2334 https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275... https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177
- nerdponx 9y ago
  Likely a circular effect. All of those things can be disruptive to sleep.
- jwilliams 9y ago
  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.
- macawfish 9y ago
  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!
  - jimrandomh 9y ago
    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.
Bartweiss 9y ago
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.)
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  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.

subcosmos 9y ago

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 http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/119/11/1510.short https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275.6.h2334 https://www.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/ajpheart.1998.275... https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1177

nerdponx 9y ago
Likely a circular effect. All of those things can be disruptive to sleep.
jwilliams 9y ago
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.
macawfish 9y ago
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!
- jimrandomh 9y ago
  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.

Bartweiss 9y ago

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.)

bunderbunder 9y ago
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.