There is no end to the ailments that smoking causes, didn’t you know? All it takes is a grant and a few crooks, and the sky is the limit.
Here we have the latest piece of epidemiological trash, that “associates” smoking with insomnia!
"Cigarette smoking has been associated with a high prevalence of sleep-related complaints. However, its effects on sleep architecture have not been fully examined. The primary objective of this investigation was to assess the impact of cigarette smoking on sleep architecture. Polysomnography was used to characterize sleep architecture among 6,400 participants … The results of this study show that cigarette smoking is independently associated with disturbances in sleep architecture, including a longer latency to sleep onset and a shift toward lighter stages of sleep. Nicotine in cigarette smoke and acute withdrawal from it may contribute to disturbances in sleep architecture."
“Wow!" — one may say — “polysomnography, that sounds difficult! It must be scientific!" No, don’t worry, it’s the usual fraud — reported in the abstract of the study, which is the only part that people read in the first place. Fortunately, we don’t fall for the cheap trick and we read the rest. You can read it too, click here to download the "study".
Table 1 says that the current smokers are different than the non-smokers for almost all categories — that means for all confounders. The confounders generally come from a questionnaire, very much along the trash that is used for passive smoking. Therefore many important variables are present that have not been measured. Furthermore, the observed variables cannot be transformed into objective measures, as they are of qualitative nature. For example, what is the measure of the “quality of life"?
In Table 2 the first two entries show differences of a few minutes: who cares? The difference for the “total sleep hours," although "statistically significant," is insignificantly small, of no practical implication whatsoever. Ditto for the remaining entries. The same can be observed in Figure 1.
The practical significance of Table 3 is not apparent. In the dissertation at the end of page 6 it is said that there is no dose response for current smokers. That alone would be sufficient to exonerate smoking and find that the tiny differences could be due to other causes (but let’s not forget that here the political intent is to associate smoking to yet another problem, so that does not matter.)
We can see the same at the beginning of the second column in page 8: "Contrary to our expectation, the distribution of sleep architecture among current smokers was not a function of lifetime exposure to cigarette smoking as quantified by pack-years."
At the end of the study we read a virtual admission, obscured of course, of the impossibility of demonstrating with science the politically-motivated preconceptions of the authors:
"First, smoking status was based on self-report without corroborating objective documentation. However, we speculate that any misclassification in smoking status is not likely to be associated with the findings of the sleep study and thus could have introduced minimal, if any, bias in the results. Second, restricting the analysis to participants with high-quality polysomnograms may have omitted the most susceptible individuals with disrupted sleep (e.g., smokers whose sleep quality is poor) and diluted the associations of interest. Third, given the cross-sectional nature of our data, causality could not be established definitively. Itis certainly plausible that fatigue and sleepiness that result from sleep disruption might lead to smoking given its associated mild stimulant effects. Fourth, data on other tobacco use (e.g., cigars and pipes) or secondhand exposure to smoke were not available for the cohort. Finally, although sensitivity analyses were conducted to determine whether specific medications (i.e., psychotropics) were associated with alternations in sleep architecture, the lack of specific information on psychiatric disorders leaves the possibility of residual confounding by such disorders."
So, what is said in the abstract is not what is said in the study, but, once again, the abstract is the only thing that incompetent journalists who already believe the ideology (or are told to write the party line — or else!) read anyway.
In short this is a fraud — yet another fraud. Fraud is indeed the sole foundation of the antismoking con job of “public health." The problem with this scum is that they feel so safe, immune, and untouchable that they assume a freedom to create any scarecrow they are in the mood for. The goal is arrogant cultural engineering, and junk science, as usual, is the perfect tool. Their frauds are to be reported and accepted without question. This is the policy regarding smoking and all items of Health and Safety ideology.
Happy smoking, and golden dreams of liberty and truth, two things that today you can find only in dreamland. When you are wide awake you will want to help us change that.
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