Sleep Dynamic Therapy

Today, at my talk at Sandia National Laboratories, the audience was interested in my opinion on the recent article on sleep duration in relationship to premature death from heart disease. As I’ve pointed out previously, these studies are incomplete works because they are looking at a sleep quantity model. Yet, the real insight is mostly likely explained by underlying physiological sleep disorders that causes one group to sleep too long (for example, classic sleep apnea patients with hypersomnia) and one group to sleep too short (for example, sleep breathing patients with a co-occurring problem of insomnia). Both types of patients have an underlying physical sleep disorder, but they look very different due to their pronounced differences in sleep duration. So, is sleep duration the important risk, or is it really the underlying physical sleep disorder? Parsimony suggests that sleep breathing problems provide the best reason to explain premature death rates.