This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related articles  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Obesity  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

While the association between obesity and short sleep duration is intriguing, Vorona and colleagues¹ seriously misrepresent their findings based on what appears to be confusion over "regression to the mean," an important statistical concept credited to Sir Francis Galton,² the brilliant but misguided founder of the eugenics movement.³ The authors make 2 implausible and inaccurate statements that I fear the lay press will focus on:

The difference in total sleep time between patients in the normal weight group (BMI, 22 ± 1.8) and the other patients (BMI, 32 ± 6.6) was 16 minutes per day [1.86 h/wk]. Because 1.86 hours per week is associated with a difference in BMI of 10 . . . , a 1-hour per week difference in total sleep time is equivalent to a mean BMI increase of 5.4.^1(p27)

 . . . should adequate sleep be recommended in weight loss programs . . . ? . . . Our findings suggest that major extension of sleep time may not be necessary, as an extra 20 . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLES

"Regression" of Adiposity With More Sleep—Reply
Robert Daniel Vorona, J. Catesby Ware, and Trent D. Buskirk
Arch Intern Med. 2005;165(11):1315.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Overweight and Obese Patients in a Primary Care Population Report Less Sleep Than Patients With a Normal Body Mass Index
Robert D. Vorona, Maria P. Winn, Teresa W. Babineau, Benjamin P. Eng, Howard R. Feldman, and J. Catesby Ware
Arch Intern Med. 2005;165(1):25-30.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT