Siesta. Just the thought of a lazy lunch followed by a peaceful nap is enough to lower blood pressure and reduce stress. Whether actually taking one is good for the heart, though, is still swinging in the breeze.
In Greece, at least, napping seems to reduce the risk of dying from heart disease, according to a study published in the Feb. 12, 2007, Archives of Internal Medicine. Working men benefited the most from napping, while it seemed to have little effect on women and on men who were retired.
The topic of napping and heart disease is anything but a relaxing one for researchers. Some studies have shown that nappers are more likely to have heart trouble or die prematurely from it. This could be because the researchers didn’t account for existing heart disease, which can interfere with nighttime sleep and cause daytime sleepiness, and thus the need for naps. It is also possible that waking up after a siesta opens a small window of heightened heart attack risk, much like waking up in the morning does.
A randomized trial would certainly help put the issue to rest. We’d volunteer if, by some miracle, such a study were ever funded. In the meantime, keep in mind that what the Greek study showed was an association between napping and less heart disease, not a cause and effect. It could mean that napping eases stress, and so protects the heart. It could also mean that people who regularly nap do so because they aren’t as stressed as those who don’t — or can’t — nap. In other words, taking a siesta or napping remains one of those things to do because you enjoy it, not because you feel you should for your heart and health.
Do you nap?
The Harvard Heart Letter provides eight pages of monthly heart news, directly from the more than 8,000 doctors and researchers at Harvard Medical School. It’s a source of expert advice for people who may already suffer from heart disease (or their family members) and for people concerned about their risk who wish to take steps towards positive change.
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Comments: 18
Drugs that are supposed to cure people from things we could never do anything about before, then are found out to cause cancer or heart failure, or not even work, then looking back into the pharmaceutical confirmation process that there was tweeaking of the numbers involved.
This kind of stuff does not give one a lot of confidence that the medical industry is doing much else other than keeping the money rolling in to maintain its unassailabe political power.
All this contradiction just makes me want to take a snoooze ... hope I don't have heart attack when I wake up.
Bruce,
I know what you mean, and agree wholeheartedly.
Why not just do things for the sheer pleasure of doing them, instead of always weighing whether they do or do not have special health benefits? So what if they don't, so long as they're not harmful?
There is no doubt that sometimes medical research points in one direction, and then new research points in a different direction. And that's frustrating for everyone--including doctors. So I understand your frustration.
The fact is that we doctors are not smart enough to always get it right the first time, and that some research is just plain hard to do.
Take the study of napping, for example. If you wanted to find out if a regular afternoon nap reduced the risk of getting heart disease in the average healthy U.S. citizen, for example, you'd have to enlist thousands of people for several years in a randomized trial. Half the folks would be told, at random, "You have to take a nap every afternoon", and half would be told the opposite: "Never take an afternoon nap." If you could pull off that kind of study, you probably would learn if afternoon naps protected against heart disease. But how likely is it that thousands of people would agree to restructure their lives that way, just to participate in the study?
Medical science is not perfect, but in just the last 60 years it has brought us vaccines against polio, antibiotics, kidney transplants, powerful and safe drugs for lowering blood pressure and cholesterol, machines that can look inside your body without touching you... and saved millions of lives.
Saying that medical research is just a way for doctors, hospitals and drug companies to make money--regardless of what good it does--seems a little too negative, to me. Don't you think?
Good article. This makes sense to me...
> The fact is that we doctors are not smart enough to always
> get it right the first time, and that some research is just plain
> hard to do.
That is a good point, and I think I realize that.
I think at the heart of it (no pun intended, again) the issue
for me is that we want to think we know more than we do.
Where does that come from? I think it is the one of the very
dangerous costs/byproducts of our capitalistic society, gone
wild, in a way.
In order to do all this research, someone has to pay for it. In
order to keep your job, someone has to do research, they have
to think up something, and then think of a way to test it, and
then have some viable money-maker come out of it.
I tend to the very cynical in wondering whether all of this
extended infrastructure of medicine is really beneficial, hard to
quantify or measure.
That is, I am very pro-research. The thing is for instance to use
an example, genetic engineering. A fantastic thing, a huge powerful
technology that will ultimately transform the world, not doubt.
In my opinion though there are more abuses and terrors coming
out of this industry due to capital wanting to make profit off it and
use what we know now, even if we have little understanding of
the limitations or dangers, to make money, before others get the
jump on us. Hormones in cow milk, terminator genes, an industry
that I find absolutely repugnant, and wonder if I have anything human
in common with someone who would put these things in our world.
I am a strong rationalist, a scientist and and engineer, but unthinking
or unregulated uses of these technogies or "lies" about what they
can do now and their dangers are unacceptable.
The studies of these naps for instance. Correct me if I'm wrong, but
they are basically run the number studies on large masses of data
that is collected looking for statiscal corrections ... and then the argument
begins as to whether and what a causal function would be and how
to do something with that ... and usually it is figure some way to make
a buck off it.
Telling people to eat milk, eggs, hoodia, vitamins, based on some
very abstract inference. I'm thinking it might be easier and cheaper
to teach people basic health concepts and find a way to regulate
the almost ubiquitous abundance of things that are unhealthy for us
so someone can make a buck selling it and then fixing us when we
have actually used it.
No, I never nap. In Taiwan, all students below senior high school must take a mandatory nap after lunch. I HATED it. I had to put my head down on the desk and remain still to pretend that I was napping. If I moved, my name would be written down on the blackboard and I would get punished. I was so happy when I started senior high school and NO MORE NAPS!!
Today I heard on the news how people who smoked marijuana were said to have a 40% higher rate of serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and such. To be fair they then gave the alternate point of view that there was no causal relationship because the percentage of mentally ill people have remained relatively constant.
So, isn't what they are doing is scanning some kind of database comparing things they know about different people, and if there is a correlation that fits a "poltical" or "economic" agenda they pull it out and publish it and call it science, but if something like people who drink to 3 or more drinks a day live longer than people who don't drink ... they bury it, and the blazes with any kind of scientific explanation or causality?
In the case of "cannabis" as they put it, a British study, there could be any number of reasons that have nothing to do with any kind of negative physical or mental effect. Perhaps it is easier to get these days, and people with mental illness already or the precursors of mental illness use it to self-medicate.
How can we trust you when you use these statistics in ways that are unjustified by science?
My impression from many years practicing medicine is that some people really benefit from naps: It refreshes and relaxes them, and it doesn't affect their sleep at night. Other people who try to nap during the day have the same experience as you: Napping during the day seems to make a long full night of sleep more difficult. I suggest that people listen to the wisdom of their body in deciding whether to try napping during the day.
You are surely right that a controlled study that pursues a specific hypothesis gives more reliable answers than an observational study involving huge amounts of data in hopes of getting answers to lots of different questions. But, take a look at my comment above about how hard it is to conduct a controlled trial of napping--among many other things.
In my opinion there are many observational studies that are conducted with great scientific precision by doctors who have no financial motives or biases in interpreting the data that they collect. I think such studies have revealed many important medical insights that have improved the lives of millions of people.
Are there poorly done observational studies? Absolutely. Are there doctors who conduct research looking to support certain personal biases, or to come up with an "answer" that they may be paid well for? Unfortunately, yes.
But I wouldn't dismiss medical research so broadly. When I think about my own health over the past 10 years, and I think of the options that I had available to me because of good medical research, I realize that there's a good chance that I'm here today in this Gather community because of research.
I know it has got to be very difficult to do some of these studies, let
alone peer review and interpret what they are really saying ... which
is why I wonder if they do any good or are worth very much.
* how political of motivated by business are these and is there a way to prevent that.
* Don't they take a lot of time and money to review?
* Are they not most of them inconculsive and reasons to fund more studies, thus costing us more money, good money after bad so to speak.
* It takes time and bandwidth to manage all of these studies that could be put to better use, but it may also be true there is no better way to find that better use.
* Finally, I can just picture many advertisers waiting for the latest round of studies to come out so they can include them in their new commercials, or worse, funding studies to be of use in advertising.
I did not mean to dismiss medical studies, hope I don't sound like that, like your study and information about heart attacks and how and why they can happen at seemingly random times. That was a real eye-opener.
Thanks again.