STUDY: Too much sleep linked to increased death rate

American rapper Nas once said, “sleep is the cousin of death” and it seems like this line may be true. Well, at least according to the findings of a research series about sleeping for more than eight hours.

BBC reported via Elite Daily that a series of studies suggest that sleeping for more than eight hours a night has been linked to an increased death rate.

These findings resulted from examining 16 studies that took place over the past 10 years and undertaken by researchers from the University of Warwick headed by professor of cardiovascular medicine and epidemiology Franco Cappuccio. The report is composed of data from over a million subjects regarding how long they sleep at night.

In this extensive study, subjects were put in three groups: those who slept six hours a night, those who slept between six to  eight hours, and those who slept for more than eight hours. As the study progressed, they compared how many people from each group had died since the study was conducted.

This is how the study turned out:

The mortality rate of the first group was 12 percent higher than the second group. But it was those who slept more than eight hours who were most likely to die. That group had a 30 percent higher mortality rate than those who slept between six to eight hours.

Moreover, since the cause of subjects’ death was not highlighted in the study, head researcher Cappuccio suggested that some of the subjects might have been sleeping for so long as a result of an illness. For that, there is still a small probability that their deaths would not have been caused by sleep but by their illnesses.

Meanwhile, Arizona State University Professor Shawn Youngstedt also believes too much sleeping is related to being unhealthy. In his study, he asked his subjects to sleep an extra two hours from their normal night sleep for three weeks. Youngstedt said the new sleeping pattern caused “increases in depressed mood,” “increases in inflammation,” and back aches. This lead to the professor’s proposal that the extra two hours of sleep made his subjects significantly less active, making them more at risk for health problems.