KARACHI: A study has concluded the ideal time to go to sleep if you’re trying to shed the pounds. Christmas is rapidly approaching and we’re all desperately trying to squeeze into those party outfits. But if you’re on a last ditch diet attempt before inhaling mince pies and turkey over the festive season, your partying might be to blame for your inability to shift the pounds. Not just because of those empty calories in drinks, but because you’re not getting enough sleep. A study has found that a good night’s sleep is one of the most effective ways to lose weight. One thousand dieters were studied and it was found that three quarters of those with regular sleep patterns found it easier to lose weight. How long should you be sleeping for? And what time should you hit the hay? The most effective results came from those who clocked up eight hours of sleep – after going to bed at 10.10pm. People who didn’t sleep very well were also found to be more likely to consume extra calories the following day. Four out of five good sleepers were likely to follow regular eating routines, whereas poor sleepers who have less than seven hours a night had a ‘chaotic’ eating pattern and were prone to lapses in their diets. Poor sleepers were also more likely to snack in between meals. A spokesman for Forza Supplements said: “They call it beauty sleep for a very good reason.” “Eight hours a night really does help us to lose weight and live more healthily.” Earlier this year the University of Leeds conducted a sleep study which had similar results, linking poor sleep to higher BMI. Dr Nerina Ramlakhan said: “Not getting enough sleep forces our body into crisis or survival mode. “We start to run on adrenaline which makes us conserve energy and store fat particularly around the middle.” She added that people tired from a bad night’s sleep will be more likely to consume caffeine and sugary foods during the day and gain weight. Joint pain: Ever since 400 BC and the days of Hippocrates, humans have been blaming the weather for their aches and pains. But over the years, studies using patient surveys have failed to confirm an association between aching joints, humidity and changes in barometric pressure. Still, no one had ever taken a big data approach to the question. Using big data to ask quirky medical questions is Dr Anupam Jena’s specialty. He’s a physician-economist at Harvard Medical School who has already made headlines using what he calls a “freakonomics” approach to medical research. To test the rainy day pain association, he compared two enormous data sets – more than 10 million doctor visits billed to the US medicare program – and the number of rainy days in hundreds of communities across the country. “We knew where the doctor visits were and what day they were so we were able to link that to data from more than 3,000 weather stations in the US,” he said. Then he crunched the numbers to see if there were more doctor billings for joint pain on rainy days. “No matter how you analyze the data, you don’t see a relationship,” Jena said. The study was published this week in the BMJ. But Jena is not dismissing the pain people feel on rainy days. “Pain is pain,” he said.”If you’re feeling pain on a rainy day, it maybe doesn’t matter if the rain caused the pain.” “Human beings have a tendency to perceive patterns where patterns don’t exist.” In other big data analyses Jena has posed a series of provocative questions, such as, what happens to patients who are hospitalized during major cardiology conferences when many heart doctors are out of town attending the meeting? That paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine had a surprising conclusion – fewer patients died. “We found that if a patient has a heart attack during the dates of those meetings their mortality rate is actually lower than if they have a heart attack any other time,” he said. “It suggested that we might be intervening too much and during the dates of these meetings we pull back a bit on the medical care and they do better.” In another study Jena concluded that if your city is hosting a big marathon, it’s a bad day to have a heart attack. The data showed an increase in mortality rates. It also showed that ambulance transport times get longer. The takeaway from that is not to cancel all marathons, he said. Instead cities should be aware of the problems created by traffic congestion during big urban events. Published in Daily Times, December 18th 2017.