Widening the lens of focus, there are more than twenty large-scale epidemiological studies that have tracked millions of people over many decades, all of which report the same clear relationship: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations—diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep. This chapter describes, uncomfortably, the many and varied ways in which insufficient sleep proves ruinous to all the major
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What diseases and physiological system are most impacted by sleep?
