Reducing Worries: People with less stress can usually sleep better. So, who tends to sleep better, workers or retirees? That depends upon the job, the financial situation upon retirement, one's health, on and on.
The study involved employees from the French national gas and electricity company, Electricité de France-Gaz de France, who retired between 1990 and 2006 at a mean age of 55 years. The study includes data from 11,581 male and 3,133 female workers who reported sleep disturbances at least once before and once after the year of retirement. Thirty-five percent of participants had worked night shifts, and 17 percent reported having depression.
Let's see...the workers there have socialized medicine, strong job security, and a generous pension (80 percent of salary) upon retirement that begins between ages 55 and 60. The average retiree must sleep better.
Results show that the odds of having disturbed sleep in the seven years after retirement were 26 percent lower than in the seven years before retiring. Sleep disturbance prevalence rates among 14,714 participants fell from 24.2 percent in the last year before retirement to 17.8 percent in the first year after retiring. The greatest reduction in sleep disturbances was reported by participants with depression or mental fatigue prior to retirement. The postretirement improvement in sleep also was more pronounced in men, management-level workers, employees who reported high psychological job demands, and people who occasionally or consistently worked night shifts.
The only exception was for folks who retired for health reasons--illness and disability. Their odds for sleep disturbances increased 46 percent after retirement.
"We believe these findings are largely applicable in situations where financial incentives not to retire are relatively weak," said Vahtera. "In countries and positions where there is no proper pension level to guarantee financial security beyond working age, however, retirement may be followed by severe stress disturbing sleep even more than before retirement."
That seems rather obvious. The researchers did note that after retirement, the tendency towards sleep disturbances slowly trended upward, though it remained below the rate before retirement.
Promoting Tai Chi: If Tai Chi didn't provide physical benefits, there wouldn't be so many people doing it. Here's a study regarding its impacts on knee osteoarthritis (OA), a condition which is common amongst senior citizens.
For this study, Chenchen Wang, M.D., M.Sc., and colleagues recruited 40 patients from the greater Boston area with confirmed knee OA who were in otherwise good health. The mean age of participants was 65 years... Patients were randomly selected and 20 were asked to participate in 60-minute Yang style Tai Chi sessions twice weekly for 12 weeks. Each session included: a 10-minute self-massage and a review of Tai Chi principles; 30 minutes of Tai Chi movement; 10 minutes of breathing technique; and 10 minutes of relaxation.
...
The remaining 20 participants assigned to the control group attended two 60-minute class sessions per week for 12 weeks. Each control session included 40 minutes of instruction covering OA as a disease, diet and nutrition, therapies to treat OA, or physical and mental health education. The final 20 minutes consisted of stretching exercises involving the upper body, trunk, and lower body, with each stretch being held for 10-15 seconds.
At the end of the 12-week period, patients practicing Tai Chi exhibited a significant decrease in knee pain compared with those in the control group. ... Researchers also observed improved physical function, self-efficacy, depression, and health status for knee OA in subjects in the Tai Chi group.
That's good to know. However, it's too bad the researchers didn't compare Tai Chi with other forms of exercise that improve fitness. Despite the seemingly rather placid movements, Tai Chi clearly involves physical exertion. The average stretching exercise is mostly about stretching. Compounding this issue is the fact that the stretching group spent less time exercising than the Tai Chi group.
"Our observations emphasize a need to further evaluate the biologic mechanisms and approaches of Tai Chi to extend its benefits to a broader population," concluded Dr. Wang.
That's definitely not an unbiased researcher.
Image and Activity: Teen girls have sex for a number of reasons. Self-image can definitely impact the riskiness of such behavior.
Of the nearly 7,200 high school girls asked about their sexual activity and risky sexual behavior as part of the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance survey, half reported ever having sex. Those girls who were both sexually active and overweight, or who thought they were overweight, were less likely to use condoms than normal-weight sexually active girls. Underweight girls also were less likely to use condoms.
Ethnicity also plays a role.
- Caucasian girls who believed that they were underweight, whether accurate or not, were more likely to have had sex and to have had four or more sexual partners. Overweight Caucasian girls were less likely to use condoms.
- Underweight African-American girls also were less likely to use condoms while overweight African-American girls reported four or more sexual partners.
- Latina girls of all weights were more likely to engage in a wide variety of sexual risk behaviors -- lack of condom or oral contraception use, sex before age 13, greater than four sexual partners and use of alcohol.
The referenced CDC survey didn't delve into why the kids engaged in risky behaviors.
You know, I hate studies like these. Or, at least, reports like these. You end up with a number...like 53 percent of some identified group, like "overweight Caucasion girls" and immediately you get reactions like "we need to do something about this."
What the math impaired fail to get is that 53 percent is not significantly different from 50--in most cases. What does it mean to have a 50 percent occurance of a think in a group like overweight Caucasian girls? Well, it would seem to me that the likelyhood of Caucasian girls who are overweight are just as likely to not do a thing.
What kind of predictability do studies like this allow you to have? None. Actions are just as well predicted by random noise.
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Posted by: OregonGuy | November 02, 2009 at 09:08
The CDC data itself is a compilation of a national, 40 state, and 21 local studies which weren't identical and often involved fairly small sample sizes. Overall, the samples were tilted towards kids in urban settings. And the data itself is teens hopefully telling the truth about what they do. I can understand looking for trends in such data which might merit further research, but not much further than that.
Posted by: RoguePundit | November 02, 2009 at 11:47