We have earlier published about the possible danger of sleeping on a radio- and TV antenna, i.e. a metal spring mattress. Due to resonance effects and standing waves there is a possibility that parts of the body will suffer from continuous disturbance from weak electric fields. These fields may affect the important repair work of damaged DNA in our cells, that is supposed to be carried out especially during night.
If this disturbance goes on night after night, year after year, you have to ask for lots of bribes not to believe that this might be a problem. In one paper [1] the left dominance of breast cancer and melanoma is explained, simply because we tend to sleep for longer time on the right side (due to the heart that is on the left side). And this makes the left side rest further up from the field attenuating metal mattress so that incident and reflecting waves instead tend to add and increase the electric field strength higher up. So, the left side is worse off and should be expected to have a somewhat higher incidence than the right side.
If this really is a valid hypothesis we should also expect that countries using these nice, expensive metal spring beds would show higher incidence than countries that mainly sleep on non-metal beds, like in Japan where they roll out their Futons on the floor every night. This was shown in another paper where bed standard and cancer statistics were collected from different parts of the world, [2].
Well, if this holds true, then it would be logical to expect that people who sleep for longer periods every night on such wave reflecting beds would be at grater risk of getting breast cancer than those who stay in bed for shorter periods. Figure 1 shows breast cancer incidence (age-standardized, world standard) from Denmark and Sweden. Since Denmark released data also from before 1955, in contrast to what was decided in Sweden after a meeting in Oslo June 1957, we can still see that breast cancer incidence stayed stable around 42/100 000 person years (py) up to 1955, increasing thereafter as in Sweden.
Figure 1. Age-standardized incidence of breast cancer in Denmark and Sweden.
Let us say that before 1955 we had an incidence of 42 and that we in Sweden now have around 80/100 000 py. If the incidence of 42 represents the time where we had no FM radio with its body-resonant radiation, then we could say that this value represents the incidence with no sleeping time in a resonant bed. Likewise, the incidence of 80 today represents a standard 7,5h of sleeping every night in the broadcasting environment we now have to live and die with. A linear extrapolation to 9.5 h average sleeping time would then suggest an incidence of 90.1/100 000 py, corresponding to an Odds Ratio (OR) of 1.127. Before 1955 the corresponding OR was 0.525. See Figure 2.
Figure 2. Breast cancer in Sweden 1955 and 2005 at average sleeping time of 7,5h and reported hazard ratios for increasing sleeping time per night according to McElroy et al.; Pinheiro et al. and Kakizaki et al.
Now, it turns out that already in 2006 there was a study on the possible association between breast cancer and sleep duration. Presumably, the hypothesis was to show that a long sleep duration would be good for your health, since the melatonin and other cell repair functions had more time to do their important clean-up job of damaged DNA cells. But, surprise surprise, the longer you slept, the higher the breast cancer risk. The paper, Duration of sleep and breast cancer risk in a large population-based case–control study by JANE A. McELROY et al. noticed that the OR between 7-7.9 and >9h (say 9.5) of sleep was 1.13 or about 6% increased risk for every h of extra sleeping time. Also Pinheiro et al. [4] found an increasing trend of breast cancer by sleep duration from 5 to 8h in the USA. At 9h there were only 189 cases reported while over 4000 cases reported at the shorter sleeping durations.
Their results are very consistent with the incidence data given in Figure 1 and is a strong support to the hypothesis that the bed standard is a key factor and not the sleeping time per se. In Japan melanoma is only about 3% of the rates we have in Sweden and breast cancer in the order of 50 %! But they sleep every night, just as we also did before 1955 with no melanoma or breast cancer disaster as we have today. And in Japan, where they do not sleep on radio antennas, it is only good for your health if you sleep many hours per night! (Ref. [5]; Figure 2).
It would be very easy to test DNA repair capacity (DRC) by taking blood samples from people sleeping on antennas and from people sleeping on nice, healthy Tempur beds or similar.
Even the general mortality seems to get worse if you spend longer time in Western beds. In ref [6] Youngstedt and Kripke found a 5% increase in mortality if you sleep longer than 7.5h based on a large population (1.1 million). And if you restrict the analysis to those older than 60 years, the mortality increases very clearly by sleeping time as Mesas et al. found in 2010, [7]. See Figure 3.
Figure 3. Increasing mortality vs. sleeping time among people older than 60 years in Spain, [7].
The data presented in different papers all together point in the same direction. We really need to look into the bed environment if we want to come closer understanding the real cause behind the cancer boom in Western countries since 1955. The possibility to cut down cancer rates, e.g by a factor of two, may be much greater than ever anticipated. Just get rid of your metal spring mattress!
But who cares? The Cancer funding organizations? The bed manufacturers? The professional epidemiologists who have had all this data in front of their eyes for 50 years? The cancer medical industries making billions of $ on expensive pills and drugs? The mobile- and telecom industries, who have invested thousands of billion US$ in radiating infrastructure? Our easily manipulated politicians, who prosper from good contacts and lunches together with rich lobbyists?
This field will never be opened up for research, and certainly not for funded research.
