How Daylight Savings Affects Health
The annual leap forward this Sunday provides an opportunity for researchers to see what the time shift—and the sleep loss that may accompany it—may do to our health.
Plenty of maladies correlate with the loss of an hour’s sleep due to daylight savings time, but is there a causal relationship? “While researchers have looked at a number of health trends surrounding the first day of daylight saving time—including apparent upticks in accidents, heart attacks and suicides—it’s unclear whether the adjusted clock setting is itself responsible for these health issues.’It’s not really understood why some of these health problems that are published coincide with the time change,’ said Russell Rosenberg, vice chairman of the National Sleep Foundation.”
