Yeah I feel like the results could be stated more clearly. At any rate this doesn't seem to associate risk with any chosen behavior.

This was how I read it as well. Having a neurological issue that causes you to fall asleep in the middle of the day would logically be a good thing to check for correlation with dementia risk. Separate from not needing to nap, but choosing to.

It seems to me that perhaps the data better supports that dementia is correlated with unintentional and short naps. This makes it sound like they think it is causal, which I doubt.

Easily. I'm 80% sure that they did reverse cause and effect.

Yes, ironically they even admit possible reverse causal effect along with many other causal variables. Frankly, this is not exactly stellar research in my view, at least with the rather reckless insinuations not supported.

My father in law had the same issue resolved by a CPAP machine. No more naps.

My sleep doctor was skeptical that I had sleep apnea during my initial consult because I indicated I don’t doze off unintentionally, even though I told her I consume 1000mg of caffeine a day to manage the sleepiness. I did tell her I took intentional naps on the weekends.

My sleep study revealed an average of 39 apnea events an hour and now I have a CPAP and am sleeping much better!

> I wonder if this study is missing some quite big issues here.

Definitely seems like a possible "correlation is not causation".

I would find it hard to believe that sleep is somehow biologically harmful.

So, like your example, excessive or unintentionally napping is instead a sign of an underlying issue or poor health. Possibly the body trying to sleep to repair some damage?

I wonder what unitentional napping means as well. I assume it's for example watching TV/reading a book on the sofa and falling asleep as opposed to wanting to fall asleep with a book or while watching TV.

I think we need to understand what intentional vs unintentional napping is.

See what I mean?

Except intentional napping, which could be "yawn, I slept bad last night; I'm gonna go take a nap" is not a risk.