Association of Sleep Duration with Chronic Diseases in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Potsdam Study

Background: In view of the reduced number of hours devoted to sleep in modern western societies the question arises what effects might result from sleep duration on occurrence of chronic diseases. Methods: Data from 23 620 middle-aged participants of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Potsdam study, that were recruited between 1994–1998, were analyzed by using Cox proportional hazard regression to examine the association between self-reported sleep duration at baseline and incidence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes, myocardial infarction, stroke, and cancer. Results: During a mean follow-up period of 7.8 years 841 incident cases of type 2 diabetes, 197 cases of myocardial infarction, 169 incident strokes, and 846 tumor cases were observed. Compared to persons sleeping 7-,8 h/day, participants with sleep duration of,6 h had a significantly increased risk of stroke (Hazard Ratio (HR) = 2.06, 95

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Class, gender and time poverty: a time-use analysis of British workers’ free time resources

Free time, that is, the time that remains at one's own discretion after conducting daily work and personal care activities, has been previously recognized as a ‘primary good’ and an important welfare resource that provides opportunities for participation in social life and leisure. However, recent years have witnessed an increasing preoccupation with the phenomenon of time poverty, drawing attention to the distribution of free time and its relationship to structural and family circumstances. In this article we propose a novel approach to the measurement of time poverty and document its occurrence amongst British workers. In line with previous literature, a conceptualization of time poverty as a relative lack of free time resources vis-à-vis other members of the community is adopted. However, unlike previous empirical studies, we investigate the differential configuration of time poverty on weekdays and weekend days, alongside indicators of the quality of free time, taking into account insights from theoretical and empirical work within the field of the sociology of time. Our analysis of the 2000 UK Time Use Survey highlights class and gender inequalities that have been missed by previous measurement approaches and demonstrates that, overall, working women experience multiple and more severe free time constraints, which may constitute an additional barrier for their leisure and social participation

Time use studies: A method for exploring everyday life in the Third Age.

Activity patterns after retirement have always constituted a theme of central interest for social gerontology. However, despite the recent theoretical focus on the emergence of the Third Age as a period of self-fulfilment and an ongoing engagement with an active leisure lifestyle after retirement, sociology's knowledge regarding everyday life in older ages remains limited as there is a dearth of social surveys on how older people spend their time. Furthermore, the majority of existing studies on the topic rely on data from conventional interviewer-administered questionnaire surveys that do not provide a holistic account of everyday activities and also have certain methodological weaknesses. Few studies capitalize on data from time-use surveys, which currently constitute the most widely employed and accurate methodology for collecting information on daily activities. The aim of this chapter is to introduce time-use methodology to researchers in the field of aging and to discuss the contributions that analyses of time-use data can bring in the field of social gerontology in the era of the Third Age. The first part of the chapter reviews the basic methodological aspects of time-use surveys and provides a discussion of their advantages over alternative methods of data collection on individuals' time allocation. In the second part an example of a time-use analysis is provided: British data from 2000 are analyzed to examine the socio-demographic correlates of participation in ‘active’ and ‘passive’ leisure activities for people over the age of 64

Identifying the third agers: An analysis of British retirees' leisure pursuits

Despite the recent theoretical focus on the emergence of the Third Age as a period of fulfilment and an ongoing engagement with an active leisure lifestyle, there is a dearth of quantitative studies on how older people spend their time. Few studies of later life capitalise on time-use surveys, which constitute the most widely employed and accurate methodology for collecting data on everyday life. This article analyses data from the 2000 UK Time Use Survey in order to operationalise the concept of the Third Age and test theoretical propositions regarding the irrelevance of social divisions in the formation of an active leisure lifestyle after retirement. The analysis focuses on a subsample of 1615 people over the age of 64. An index of active leisure activities is constructed in order to estimate the proportion of third agers amongst British retirees. Logistic regression models are specified to examine the relative influence of socio-demographic characteristics on the probability of a person being a third ager. Strong effects of structural factors and health are found, which do not support arguments suggesting a minor influence of social context in lifestyle choices after retirement. 'Active' ageing appears to be the province of those who are culturally and materially advantaged, and it is the healthy, educated, upper-class and middle-class men that are more likely to engage in a Third Age leisure lifestyle

Lack of sleep, work and the long hours culture: Evidence from the UK Time Use Survey

Sleep is functional for individual and societal well-being, with partial sleep deprivation associated with adverse health and safety consequences. Surprisingly, sleep is absent from work—life balance debates and has remained largely under-researched by sociologists. This article examines the relationship of insufficient sleep duration with occupational circumstances and family responsibilities, providing a contribution to the examination of the health consequences of working patterns in the UK. We analyse time use data from 2000, focusing on a sub-sample of workers aged 20—60 years (n = 2882). Nested logistic regression modelling is used to identify the segments of the working population getting a short sleep duration that if sustained may have negative health outcomes. An inverse relationship between working hours and sleep duration is found, which is stronger for men than women. Shift work and social class are also significant predictors of short sleep for men

Using new technologies for time diary data collection: instrument design and data quality findings from a mixed-mode pilot survey

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth of time-use research, driven by the increased research and policy interest in population activity patterns and their associations with long-term outcomes. There is recent interest in moving beyond traditional paper-administered time diaries to use new technologies for data collection in order to reduce respondent burden and administration costs, and to improve data quality. This paper presents two novel diary instruments that were employed by a large-scale multi-disciplinary cohort study in order to obtain information on the time allocation of adolescents in the United Kingdom. A web-administered diary and a smartphone app were created, and a mixed-mode data collection approach was followed: cohort members were asked to choose between these two modes, and those who were unable or refused to use the web/app modes were offered a paper diary. Using data from a pilot survey of 86 participants, we examine diary data quality indicators across the three modes. Results suggest that the web and app modes yield an overall better time diary data quality than the paper mode, with a higher proportion of diaries with complete activity and contextual information. Results also show that the web and app modes yield a comparable number of activity episodes to the paper mode. These results suggest that the use of new technologies can improve diary data quality. Future research using larger samples should systematically investigate selection and measurement effects in mixed-mode time-use survey designs