While sleep is generally viewed as a critical and beneficial period of bodily rest, researchers at UB have found that sleeping more than eight hours a day - something familiar to many college students - could lead to an increased risk of death by stroke.
According to Adnan Qureshi, assistant professor of neurosurgery and lead author for the study, college students pulling all-nighters should not worry because "we did not find any correlation between stroke and sleeping less than eight hours."
The study, conducted at UB's Toshiba Research Center in the School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, was based on information collected by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in 1982.
The 1982 study "gathered information about a demographic," said Qureshi. Researchers followed up on the study participants a decade later to gauge changes in their health since the original survey.
"[We] looked at the data to see how it correlated with the participants' sleep patterns," Qureshi said.
The UB study, which looked at participants between the ages of 18 and 75, showed that people who slept more than eight hours a night or needed naps during the day to stave off exhaustion had a greater possibility of stroke.
When a person sleeps more than the recommended eight hours a night and is still tired during the day, their sleep is not effective and they could have an underlying, untreated sleep disorder, such as sleep apnea, said Qureshi.
The follow-up study enabled researchers to determine whether participants were still alive after the 10-year period, and if not, how long after the initial survey they died and the cause of death, said Qureshi.
"That was how we made the correlation," said Qureshi.
According to Qureshi, sleep apnea, the most common sleep disorder due to its links to cardiovascular disease, causes people to stop breathing repeatedly throughout the night due to a lack of or low amount of oxygen in the lungs.
The stoppage in breathing causes the person to wake up often during the night, thus encouraging them to "sleep longer because their sleep was interrupted and in the morning wake up tired," said Qureshi.
The lack of restful sleep triggers the need for excessive sleeping or daytime naps and will increase the risk of stroke for people suffering from a disorder such as sleep apnea.
"People need to talk to their primary physician so that they can evaluate them in order to find problems," said Qureshi.
Along with the sleeping disorder ,"the risk of stroke increases for those people who smoke or suffer from diabetes along extensive sleep," Qureshi added.
The new study supports an earlier one conducted by Qureshi, where he studied the data complied from a stroke screening program of 1,400 adults from the Buffalo area.
According to Qureshi, a "true association can be made because two studies with different methods gave the same results."
Qureshi and his team are working on the final analysis of their findings to prepare them for publication.
