Study links duration of sleep, suicidal thoughts

Newresearch suggests a link between sleep duration and suicidal thoughts among people with insomnia.

Every additional hour someone with insomnia sleeps is associated with a 72 percent drop

Heart patients do better if admitted on Monday

Patients hospitalized for heart failure appear to have better odds of survival if they’re admitted on Mondays or in the morning, a new study finds.

Death rates and length of stay are highest among heart failure patients admitted in January, on Fridays and overnight, according to the researchers, who were scheduled to present their findings Saturday in Portugal at the annual meeting of the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology.

“The fact that patients admitted right before the weekend and in the middle of the night do worse and are in the hospital longer suggests that staffing levels may contribute to the findings,” Dr. David Kao, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said in a news release from the cardiology society.

The study involved 14 years of data on more than 900,000 patients with congestive heart failure, a condition in which the heart doesn’t properly pump blood to the rest of the body. All of the patients were admitted to hospitals in New York between 1994 and 2007. The researchers analyzed the effect the hour, day and month of the patients’ admissions had on death rates and the length of time they spent in the hospital. Patients admitted between 6 a.m. and noon fared better than evening admissions, the study found.