Comment by geysersam
2 years ago
It seems easier to see: "some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them have an irregular sleep schedule; some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them die early"
2 years ago
It seems easier to see: "some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them have an irregular sleep schedule; some people have lots of difficulties in their lives that makes them die early"
I agree - an obvious connection would be "Lower income jobs tend to have less control over their schedule", be it shift workers, hourly service jobs or similar. There also may be links to worse healthcare due to lack of insurance in those jobs.
It might just be another "Poorer people don't live as long" correlation.
The source data is from the UK so it has nothing to do with the health insurance attached to specific jobs. Healthcare is covered via general taxation in the UK.
Interestingly enough, even in countries with tax funded healthcare people with lower income and socioeconomic status tend to receive worse healthcare (fewer expensive interventions, etc).
I'm aware of the UK system, having been born and lived there for over 25 years :) I didn't note that the data was from UK persons, but the general point likely remains, if not as strongly.
While true health insurance isn't attached to jobs in the same way, there's still uneven access - the town I grew up in closed it's local surgery a decade or so ago, so it's about a 30 minute drive, or over 2 hours on a rather indirect bus. Not everyone has a car, or can afford to take pretty much an entire day off work to get there. Assuming you can actually get an appointment, too. Richer areas often are better served, and richer people have better access to transport and time flexibility.
And my job came with BUPA membership, which can also make some things easier, it's not the hard barrier to any care in the same way as the American system.
And while the paper said that it corrected for Socioeconomic status, knowing the /scale/ (and possible error) in that correction relative to the claimed meaningful difference would be useful in studies like this. It feels like the sort of correction should be detailed more than just saying they did it.
But I guess the paper isn't really claiming causation, merely correlation in that it's a predictor of mortality. Though many commenters here seem to assume.
They at least tried: "Results were adjusted for age, sex, ethnicity, and sociodemographic, lifestyle, and health factors."
I wonder if lifestyle or sociodemographic includes having specifically young children. That seems like a specific known temporary sleep disruption.
3 replies →
Also: "people in poor health don't sleep well". That's really hard to fully control for, because a lot of problems will affect mortality at sub-clinical levels that don't satisfy diagnostic criteria and won't appear on your medical records.
I would presume that they somehow controlled for this most obvious confounding factor. almost every experiment I find that they are naysayers (as important as they are) that assume someone just simply plotted a chi-squared distribution.
> presume
Okay