2023-06-16 12:35:02
PARIS (AFP) – People who stay up late are actually no less likely to live than those who go to bed and get up early – as long as they don’t drink and smoke during the night, a 37-year study said today.
Past research has shown that people who stay up late and have a hard time waking up early are more likely to suffer from a range of health problems.
In 2018, a large British study found that night type people had a 10% higher risk of death than morning type people over a period of 6.5 years.
While this may be worrying news for the world’s night owls, the study did not take into account factors that may have contributed to these deaths, such as alcohol intake.
So Finnish researchers have published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Chronobiology International to explore this question further.
The study followed 24,000 same-sex twins in Finland and asked them in 1981 whether they were morning or night types.
A third of them said they were somewhat night people, 10 percent said they were definitely night people, and the rest of the subjects were morning people.
Night people tend to be younger and tend to drink more and smoke more.
When the researchers followed up in 2018, more than 8,700 of these twins had died.
Over the 37-year period, the researchers found that night owls did have a 9 percent higher risk of death from a variety of factors, a figure similar to the 2018 study.
However, the study published today said the difference was “mainly attributable to smoking and alcohol”. For example, night owls who drink less alcohol and don’t smoke don’t die sooner than morning types.
Lead author Christer Hublin of the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health told AFP that the findings suggest there are actions night owls can take to reduce their risk of premature death.
“Clearly, night type people should think more seriously about their alcohol and tobacco intake,” Heblin said.
Regardless of other factors, people’s sleep-time preferences, known as “chronotypes,” had “little or no impact” on their mortality rates, Herblin said.
Jeevan Fernando, a chronotype scientist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, told AFP that while the findings are reasonable, they have limitations.
Asking participants to self-identify as morning or night people is “unsatisfactory because it doesn’t contain any objective information,” Fernando said, unlike modern research methods.
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