> UC Berkeley sleep scientists have begun to reveal what it is about fragmented nightly sleep that leads to the fatty arterial plaque buildup known as atherosclerosis that can result in fatal heart disease.
This is a causal claim, emphasis mine, which contradicts:
> “To the best of our knowledge, these data are the first to associate sleep fragmentation, inflammation and atherosclerosis in humans,” said study lead author Raphael Vallat
which is a correlative claim, emphasis also mine, and they use "linked" throughout the article, which is also correlative.
So does fitful sleep "lead to" chronic inflammation and arterial plaque, or are chronic inflammation and arterial plaque simply typical of people in poorer health and/or overweight, which can itself potentially cause sleep disorders, ie. a correlation? I'm not sure we know the actual root causes here.
> “Indeed, these associational results in humans mirror recent data in which experimentally manipulated sleep disruption in mice led to higher levels of circulating inflammation that caused atherosclerotic lesions in the rodents,” added Vallat.
The causal claim is itself a (stronger form of) correlation,
so how is that a contradiction? They claim:
1. To demonstrate a causal pathway
2. There was not a previous correlative claim that this merely strengthened
Also, given it's in an open access journal, you can trivially verify from the source rather than rely on a press release.
"we describe a pathway wherein sleep fragmentation raises inflammatory-related white blood cell counts (neutrophils and monocytes), thereby increasing atherosclerosis severity" [https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...]
> "A first limitation is that our analyses were constrained by the use of cross-sectional data, which precludes definitive assessment of directionality of associations. For example, it could be that cardiovascular disease (or associated treatments) may also drive sleep fragmentation in addition to, or rather than, the other way around."
> UC Berkeley sleep scientists have begun to reveal what it is about fragmented nightly sleep that leads to the fatty arterial plaque buildup known as atherosclerosis that can result in fatal heart disease.
This is a causal claim, emphasis mine, which contradicts:
> “To the best of our knowledge, these data are the first to associate sleep fragmentation, inflammation and atherosclerosis in humans,” said study lead author Raphael Vallat
which is a correlative claim, emphasis also mine, and they use "linked" throughout the article, which is also correlative.
So does fitful sleep "lead to" chronic inflammation and arterial plaque, or are chronic inflammation and arterial plaque simply typical of people in poorer health and/or overweight, which can itself potentially cause sleep disorders, ie. a correlation? I'm not sure we know the actual root causes here.