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medpundit |
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003Researchers examined 10 years of data on 71,617 participants in Harvard's Nurses' Health Study, which tracked female nurses for a variety of studies. The women were ages 45 to 65 and had no sign of heart disease at the outset in 1986. Over 10 years, 934 of the women had nonfatal heart attacks or died of heart disease. The study relied on the nurses' recollection of their sleep patterns rather than directly measuring their sleep. The study expressed the results in terms of relative risk, not absolute numbers, but they found that more women had heart attacks who slept less than five hours and more than nine. What about those of us who sleep less than five hours some nights and more than nine other nights? Isn’t that the way most of us live? And that’s one of the problems with this study. They relied on the subjects' perceptions of how much they sleep, which for most of us varies from night to night. And perceptions are notoriously unreliable. I'm reminded every day of just how unreliable recall and self-evaluation is. Our practice has begun administering a nutritional screening survey to patients. One of the questions is "Have you lost or gained more than ten pounds in the past six months?" I'm constantly surprised at how many people answer that in the affirmative when their measured weight as recorded in their medical record hasn't changed at all. Our perceptions aren't nearly as reliable as we think they are, even when they concern something that should be wholly objective. posted by Sydney on 1/29/2003 06:23:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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