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Help Prevent Breast Cancer By Having Sufficient Sleep

Apr 17, 2009 by TacticularCancer.com

Do you suffer from insomnia? Do you have interrupted sleep? Or is your lifestyle or some factors in your life keeping you from having sufficient sleep and rest at night?

Lack of sleep does not just make you feel a little more tired or sleepier the next day – it in fact raises your risk of suffering serious diseases, including cancer, as the highlighted study suggests. Indeed, good sleep is probably one of the most underestimated elements of a healthy lifestyle.

Lack of Sleep Greatly Increases Breast Cancer Risk

by Reuben Chow

A study on almost 24,000 Japanese women recently published in the British Journal of Cancer has found that lack of sleep can greatly increase the risk of breast cancer, with women who slept 6 hours or less every night having a significantly higher risk.

Breast Cancer Statistics

Breast cancer is the most common cancer to hit women worldwide. In Japan, when age-standardized to the world population, the incidence rate was 28.3 per 100,000 in 1991, and rose to 39.5 in 2001.

In the United States in 2004, the disease hit more than 185,000 women and over 1,800 men, with almost 41,000 women and 362 men dying from it that year. In that year, after non-melanoma skin cancer, breast cancer was the next highest cancer killer of American women. It was also their fifth highest killer overall.

Next up, over to Canada, where, among the women, breast cancer is the most common type of cancer to strike. According to Canadian Cancer Society estimates, about 22,400 women will be diagnosed with the disease this year, with about 5,300 dying from it.

With such grim statistics, every little thing which can be done to prevent and combat the disease becomes all the more critical.

Details of Study

The Ohsaki National Health Insurance (NHI) Cohort Study started in 1994 and involved 28,515 women in northeastern Japan. The questionnaire used included information on sleep duration and other lifestyle habits.

Participants who had withdrawn from the NHI study before follow-up, had a history of cancer, did not provide information on their sleep duration, and who reported having slept for less than 4 hours or more than 12 hours every night were omitted. This left the data for 23,995 women to be analyzed. An 8-year period, from 1995 to 2003, was used, during which 143 women were hit with breast cancer.

Findings of Study

The women who slept 7 hours each night was used as the reference group. It was then found that women who slept 6 hours or less each night had a 62% higher risk of getting breast cancer. On the other hand, those who slept 9 hours or more every night had a 28% lower risk of getting the disease.

It would follow, then, that those who slept 6 hours or less every night had 2.25 times the risk of getting breast cancer when compared to those who slept 9 hours or more each night.

The results remained largely consistent even when participants who were diagnosed with breast cancer within 3 years from the start of the study were excluded, or when the data was analyzed by age and menopausal status.

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