Can sleeping throughout the weekend overcome sleep deprivation?

Do you have the habit of spending the most of your weekends on the bed? Do you try to catch up on the sleep that you lost on during the week? Well, the myth has been finally debunked. A group of scientists decided to explore the perspective and found some interesting facts for the weekend sleepyheads.

They found that short, but not long, weekend sleep was associated with an increased risk of early death in individuals under 65 years of age. In the same age group, either short sleep or long sleep on both weekdays and weekends showed increased mortality when compared with consistently sleeping 6-7 hours per day.

The link between sleep duration and mortality seems to be easier to understand when considering the analysis of the joint effects of weekday and weekend sleep, the authors noted.

"The results imply that short (weekday) sleep is not a risk factor for mortality if it is combined with a medium or long weekend sleep," they wrote.

"This suggests that short weekday sleep may be compensated for during the weekend and that this has implications for mortality," concluded the authors.