Excess Sleep Causes Strokes! Real Doctor Reviews New Study

that people who did excessive sleeping and excessive napping had almost double

the risk of stroke compared to people who had a more normal amount of sleep

and napping. In this video I will review those findings and I will discuss if

sleep is something we should worry about. Coming right up!

Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if

you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works

make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss

anything. So first of all what is a stroke a stroke is when the brain loses

blood supply and therefore oxygen and there can be two mechanisms that cause

this blood and oxygen loss for the brain one is called an ischemic stroke and

that's where a clot something that's been stuck for a while it gets loose and

it starts traveling and it gets stuck in a blood vessel in the brain and it clogs

the pipes so to speak so the pipes the blood vessels are intact but something

clogs it and now the blood can't get through and the portion of the brain

that's beyond that clot starves to death the other mechanism is a called a

hemorrhagic stroke and that's when the blood vessels burst that's when it's not

a clot but because it bursts then the blood just sort of seeps out it floods

the area and it can't circulate and get to the tissue and back and again we'll

lose the blood supply. Strokes are very serious business. There's about 15

million cases a year worldwide about a third of them died as a result and about

a third of them live on but they have significant

and disability and a third have more or less full recovery

so there's several reasons why people can have a greater chance of stroke and

one is if you have atherosclerotic plaques if there's a plaque buildup then

portions of those plaques or other blood clots can get dislodged and travel up to

the brain and clog the pipes you could also have weakened blood

vessels that rupture and that is from nutritional deficiencies from lack of

vitamins minerals and the essential elastic protein called collagen and

elastin there are also genetic predispositions where people are born

with weaker blood vessels or blood vessels that take very sharp turns that

get subject to more friction and another factor that can cause these vessels to

burst is if you have excessive blood pressure so if you have not we're not

talking 130, 140 where we're talking 180 to 200 for

long periods of time then that causes increased friction and increased

pressure and that can cause these blood vessels to burst but if we are to kind

of group all these causes together then they're called cardiovascular disease

and the cause is all of the factors the inflammation the insulin the unbalanced

lipid profiles and everything that goes together with metabolic syndrome that

we've talked about in some other videos the cause of strokes is cardiovascular

disease basically okay so strokes don't happen unless you have something that's

been going on for a while first so then the question is of course how would

sleep contribute to the development of a stroke so let's just look at the study

first it was a Chinese cohort study it was published by the American Academy of

Neurology and in the study they had thirty one

thousand seven hundred and fifty people they had an average age of sixty-two

years followed them for six years and during

those six years there were 1,557 cases of stroke and none of these people

had ever had a stroke before so then they looked at how much do these people

sleep and they found that with the people who slept more than nine hours

compared to the group who slept seven to eight hours which we consider normal

more than nine hours we consider excessive the excessive sleepers had 23%

more strokes and then if you combined the people and you looked at who had

ninety minute more than 90 minute naps plus they slept more than nine hours

every night so they slept a lot okay then these people had an 85 percent

almost double the incident of strokes almost double the risk of stroke as they

said compared to the people who slept normally who slept 7 to 8 hours and had

shorter naps and finally another factor they found was that people who reported

poor sleep quality also had a higher incidence they had a 29% higher

frequency of strokes than the baseline and then people who slept normally and

reported good sleep now that sounds pretty convincing right I don't know

that I would ever dare go to sleep without setting the alarm I don't know

if I ever want to sleep in again that sounds pretty scary and indeed the main

author of the paper doctor Xiaomin Zhang said that, I quote;

"These results highlight the importance of moderate napping and sleeping

duration and maintaining good sleep quality especially in middle-aged and

older adults." so they certainly believe what they're studying and what they're

finding that we definitely should not sleep too much we should sleep

moderately and take short naps otherwise you could get strokes now in this study

they also report some of the limitations I mean they

agreed they understand that no study is perfect that we can't just take

everything at face value so here are some of the limitations that they

reported they admitted that this was an observational study meaning that they

just observed different things and they had no idea of whether these things

actually has a causal relationship if they observed A and B they didn't know

if A caused B or vice-versa they just observed them together - they did not

account for sleep apnea or other sleep disorders these data were self-reported

these were just people telling them they didn't have them in a laboratory

measuring how much they slept these were just people reporting how much they

slept and how well they thought their sleep was they said that even though

these were very compelling findings they said that "these findings may only apply

to older healthy Chinese adults" because that was the group they were studied so

they they basically feel that it does apply to this group of people but it may

not apply to another group of people so if you're not older if you're not about

60 years old if you're not Chinese then it may not apply to you but what really

gets me here is the word healthy all right

they believe that healthy people get strokes they said that they studied

healthy people because none of these people had had a stroke before so they

must be healthy right and then 1557 people got a stroke by

some random chance from by some bad stroke of luck

all right healthy people don't get strokes if you get a heart attack or you

get a stroke you were not healthy the day before you were symptom free but you

were not healthy you had been building up a disease you had been declining in

health from many years or even decades before the

first symptom happened okay so this is such a distortion this is such a

distorted way of thinking that we have to get past and then we have to start

paying much much more attention between observation and causation so in the

conclusion they say long sleep duration long mid-day napping and poor sleep

quality were associated with higher risks of stroke okay

associated with so first they're saying it's associated there's no causal

relationship but then in the same paragraph he continues persistently long

sleep duration or switched from average to long sleep duration increased the

risk of stroke so now when they say it increases the risk now they're stating

it as a causative relationship okay and this is what we do all the time we

observed associations we see this happened and that happened and this

happened and that happened there's no causal relationship but if we observe

them enough and we say hmm I wonder if that caused that and then we say that it

increased the risk now we have we're creating a causative relationship

without there ever being one this is so important this is so fundamental to

understand the difference between caused and association that we're going to

drill this just a little bit you'll you'll like this cause versus

Association. A happens and because of A then B happens so A causes B that's a

causative relationship you with Association we observe we are an

independent observer we observe A and B this happened and that happened but we

don't know if they're related or not there is no way for us to tell if they

have any relationship other than that they exist at the same time and maybe at

the same place so let's take some examples let's say

you're driving by in a nice neighborhood that all the gardens are very nicely

manicured compared to another area where no one pays attention to the gardens so

you notice that in the nice gardens they have nice roses and they have nice lawns

does that mean that the roses caused the nice lawns does that mean that if you

have a terrible quality lawn if you just plant some nice roses that all of a

sudden you're gonna get a nice lawn no it means that people who pay attention

to their yards usually pay attention to both the roses and the lawns okay

there's no causative relationship one of my favorite examples I mentioned before

is the police is always at the site of an accident every time I see a traffic

accident there's the police does that mean the police caused the accident

no there is no causative relationship there all right and in dialysis dialysis

is when people have kidney failure when their kidneys have crashed and burns

they can no longer filter the blood and clean it then they have to hook them up

to a machine and this machine cleans the blood for them so they can live many

many years even though it's a huge burden it's very tedious it's very

time-consuming it's very expensive but these people are fortunate enough thanks

to dialysis to get many many years more of life these people who are on dialysis

they have a much much higher mortality rate the death rate of people who are on

dialysis is much much higher than the people who are not on dialysis does that

mean dialysis causes the mortality no of course not

okay these people are sick that's why they have a greater tendency of dying if

they stop the dialysis they wouldn't live a week all right so

we have to start understanding how absurd it is to observe different things

without any reason for why they should be related and all of a sudden start

putting it together and we have to use some common sense and understand nature

and physiology a little bit to make sense of these things so here's how it

really works here is why sleep is associated with strokes but not the

cause okay if anyone had just asked this question is it possible that sick people

sleep more yes you could ask a five-year-old they understand yeah if

you're sick you're gonna sleep tired old people they sleep more why because they

have low energy when they have low energy they don't have so much energy to

do their daily things their bodies are trying to heal they can't generate

energy so they sleep more and sick people have poor health they have less

function they have less ability to generate energy so is it possible that

sick people have more strokes of course cardiovascular disease is the reason for

stroke people who have cardiovascular disease have less health they have poor

health so therefore they have more strokes so if we just complete this very

very basic almost childish line of reasoning then if it's possible that

sick people sleep more and sick people have more strokes then that's the

association that people who sleep more have more strokes but sleep is not the

cause of the stroke sleeping is a natural mechanism it's absurd to think

that seven to eight hours suppose there was something harmful about lying down

maybe the blood was pooling maybe we had some compression and we'd be totally

fine for seven to eight hours lying down but somewhere around nine

hours there's a critical marker now all hell breaks loose and we get really

really sick that's absurd all right we have to start understanding

the body and what is the cause and what's simply association so to finish

up the study dr. Zhang says more research is needed to understand how

taking long naps and sleeping longer hours at night may be tied to an

increased risk of strokes here's the kicker but previous studies have shown

that long nappers and sleepers have unfavorable changes in their cholesterol

levels and increased waist circumference both of which are risk factors for

stroke so he's talking about metabolic syndrome and the answer is staring him

right in the face he notices that people who sleep more have metabolic syndrome

but he gets gets it backwards again he doesn't understand that the people

with metabolic syndrome have less health they have less energy that's why they

sleep more all right if they only could see the true causes the origins of

disease they would have this figured out in a heartbeat but the whole problem is

that we have a sick care system we are so entirely 100% focused on symptoms we

don't understand health that maybe if we called it a sick care system if we

understood that there's a sick care system and a health care system and the

hospitals they're part of the sick care system the health care system that's the

gym that's the health counselors that's the chiropractors and the yoga

instructors and the naturopaths and it's not that one is good or bad

both are necessary but one is for sick care emergency intervention and the

other is for health care is about promoting the function building the

function of the body asking what it take for a normal body to work to not

get sick but because they don't ask those questions because these are very

very intelligent people they spend years and years and years they are doctors and

PhDs but they get tunnel vision because they're in the sick care system they

study disease and pathology and symptoms and therefore they can't see the forest

for the trees do you find that you sleep more than nine hours and you take really

long naps then that may not be an ideal situation but don't worry about the

sleep worried about the reason that you may be sleeping that much people can

sleep excessively for many reasons maybe they're sick maybe they're recovering

from an infection maybe they have some underlying thing maybe they don't

generate enough energy maybe there's a metabolic problem maybe

there's some depression or anxiety at the bottom those people tend to sleep

more so yeah it may not indicate an ideal situation if you sleep excessively

but the sleep is not the problem the thing that makes you sleep excessively

might be the problem so learn as much as you can about health about how to

maintain an increase health and then you'll have less of the problems now all

of this talking made me really tired so I'm gonna go take a long nap and I'm not

going to set the alarm if you enjoy this video then make sure you check out that