Before this gets forwarded to every parent who’s up at 3 a.m.: it’s a review of reviews. Nobody followed a new group of people here. The authors gathered about 20 existing reviews and pooled what they found. That’s a good way to see where the evidence agrees. It can only be as good as the studies underneath it, and the headline’s list of diseases reads scarier than that.
“Researchers from Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland analyzed approximately 20 comprehensive review studies, involving millions of participants across multiple countries, to evaluate the impact of insomnia on health. The study, published Sunday in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews, found that insomnia was linked to a 26% increased risk of stroke. The results, which looked at multiple other studies also showed individuals with insomnia were more likely to have depression and attempted suicide compared to those without insomnia.”
Associations, in the authors’ own words. The sleep doctor in the same piece explains why that matters: anxiety and depression wreck sleep, and bad sleep feeds anxiety and depression. Which came first isn’t something this kind of study can sort out.
“Researchers cautioned that the new findings only show associations and do not prove that insomnia directly causes the health problems examined.”
The best sentence in the article came from one of the authors.
“"I would like to emphasize that people should not be frightened by these results. An increased risk at the population level does not mean that an individual with insomnia will develop dementia, depression or have a stroke," Dr. Stefan Seidel, one of the study authors and professor of neurology at the Medical University of Vienna, told ABC News.”
And what I’d actually tell a patient. If sleep has been bad for months, bring it up, and expect the first answer to be CBT, not a prescription. It’s more work than a pill. It’s also the treatment.
“"The gold standard of treatment for insomnia is CBT, but it's difficult and it's time-consuming and it's a lot of effort, especially for someone with chronic insomnia," Hamilton said. "But it is worth it."”
