Night owls die earlier due to drinking and smoking: study

By AFP
June 17, 2023

PARIS: People who tend to stay up late are not more likely to die younger than early risers -- as long as they don´t use those longer nights for drinking and smoking, a 37-year-long study suggested on Friday.

Previous research has shown that night owls, who stay up later and struggle to drag themselves out of bed in the morning, are more likely to suffer from a range of health problems.

In 2018, a large study in the UK found that evening people had a 10 percent higher risk of dying than morning people over a 6.5-year period.

While that was potentially worrying news for the world´s night owls, that research did not take into account factors, such as alcohol-consumption, that could be behind those deaths.

So researchers in Finland sought to find out more in a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Chronobiology International.