It seems so, if the latest results of a mammoth study following the lives and deaths of 100,000 people in Japan over the past decade are anything to go by. Reporting in the journal Sleep this week, the Japanese researchers starkly state that people who snoozed for more or less than seven hours a night were more likely to die earlier - the third big project of its kind to make such a discovery. Exactly how this happens, though, is still unclear. "When you fish out all the other variables it's very difficult to say whether it's the 9 hours or 5 hours sleep that is bumping you off," says Jim Horne, director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University. Factors such as illness, stress and even unemployment can all influence both mortality and people's sleep patterns, although the new research did attempt to eliminate the effects of mental stress and depression. "It just seems to happen that normal, healthy adults sleep for about 7 to 7 hours a night," Horne says. The finding is the latest to trash the popular myth that everyone needs at least 8 hours sleep. "I've been in this game for 22 years and I still don't know where that came from," says Neil Stanley, a sleep researcher at Surrey University.
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